11/01/2024
AGRO-INDUSTRIALISATION/AGRO-PROCESSING PIVOTAL FOR AGRICULTURAL & RURAL TRANSFORMATION
Undoubtedly, Uganda's agribusiness sector will only transition for the better with heavy investment agro-industrialisation. The current scattered support offered to individual farmers or clusters of farmers across the country seem to leave the main bottlenecks along multiple strategic value chains intact.
The single biggest challenge to farmers today seems to be in produce handling (drying & storage), and processing (turning produce into a product) with a fair shelve life.
Agro-industrialisation/ Agro-processing would play a pivotal role in helping to confront the challenges of produce handling and processing and must take lions share of the agriculture budget.
Investment in agro-processing would spur alot of improvement in the functionality of various value chains as processors would invest in and enforce the better crop production practices, quantity and quality and delivery mechanisms required by end buyers.
For every crop grown and produced for commercial purchases, in a district or a cluster of districts; there is needs to have 2 to 3 industrial scale processors to provide the market pull, produce handling and processing
Given the current state of cooperatives in the country; most of which are unable to effectively organise farmers, plan production, increase productivity, organise collective storage, processing and marketing. There is need to support agro- processors to provide services that would otherwise would have been provided by cooperatives; averagely performing cooperatives with minimal agro-processing technology and capacity provide a good entry point as we try to indegenise the economy.
Processors should have a direct linkage to farmers, plan production and storage and agree on product quantity, quality and pricing in a contract farming arrangement.
In the end; the work of the farmer should to be engage in crop production; thereafter wait to receive their pay cheque/paycheck. Beyond production, product handling and processing must fall in the hands of another more organised and competent sector player with the technology that can process and deliver a quality product on the market. The thinking and the culture today, is that the farmer can confront all these challenges alone.
Ideally, the farmer would handover the produce to his area maize/pineapple/coffee/Soybean/cassava/sugarcane/Tomatoes/honey cooperative for onward processing/marketing/distribution to the area markets/supermarkets or export to the international markets. But, the area cooperatives/farmer associations are nearly dysfunctional, incapable and under resourced to conduct large scale operations. This begs the question, who/what shall save the farmer?!
Do you see how the diary value chain is organised and operates in the Ankole sub-region?!
The work of the diary farmer is to produce milk and immediately handover the milk to his/her area cooperative's cooling plant. This area cooperative is linked to large milk buyer and processors in Urban centres. What happens to the milk thereafter is not work of the diary farmer but the area cooperative. The farmer waits for their pay cheque at the end of the month from their area diary cooperative.
In a 2014 visit to the Netherlands, as part of a fellowship on; Organised farmers as partners in agribusiness; optimising the performance of producer organisations; I saw the same Diary farming business model in the Netherlands. Dairy farmers there were/are organised under a Diary Farmers Cooperative. Diary farmers there have large milk cooling plants at their farms able to cool and store fresh milk for 2-3.days. The cooperative does farmer capacity building, linkages and negotiations on behalf of farmers; The cooperative is linked to a large scale buyer and processor called . The farmer only waits for their cheque at the end of the month from the diary. cooperative
The above is an excellent model that needs to be replicated across all strategic crop value chains across the country. This would spur lots job creation and hasten industrialisation in the country.
