An eye-catching piece appeared this week in a provincial newspaper: “Some 50 million people in East Africa are starving” as a result of two years of poor rainfall. According to the article, “Tanzanian maize exports are being held up by red tape at the border while people starve.”
Agriculture, on the other hand, is the only thing that Africans claim to be excellent at or that offers them a competitive edge. How can 3.5 percent of the continent’s population be starved to death due to a lack of rain in only one location while we excel at agriculture? Furthermore, as we witnessed last week, how can border red tape prevent people from obtaining food from a neighboring country?
Children exhibiting every indication of malnutrition may be seen in numerous places in Uganda. During several of my trips to the countryside, I’ve been curious about what people eat.
There are a lot of kilometers where there aren’t any gardens. When you move off the major highways and into the villages, you’ll see little gardens here and there.
You’d think that if commercial agriculture isn’t possible, at the absolute least, every family should have a garden big enough to meet their requirements. Previously, this was correct.
Africans can’t keep failing badly at what they profess to be excellent at and relying on organizations like the World Food Programme. When we sing about East Africa’s political union all the time, we can’t possibly be short on food to feed its people.
East Africa is home to various water sources, including Lake Victoria and the Nile River, which are two of the world’s largest. However, a few kilometers away from the Nile’s banks, you’ll see youngsters who haven’t eaten a solid meal in days. In addition, you’ll find food imported from Egypt cultivated with the same Nile water in stores.
Drought owing to inadequate rainfall is typically cited as one of the causes of the continent’s food shortages. However, since water is so close to people in East Africa, there are no plans to use irrigation to irrigate the plants.
Droughts will progressively become the rule rather than the exception as a result of climate change. However, East Africa, or even Sub-Saharan Africa, isn’t the only part of the planet experiencing climate change. How is it that we are able to import food from other locations that are also affected by climate change?
Sub-Saharan Africa imported $43 billion worth of food in 2019, with the figure expected to rise to $100 billion by 2030. This is a concerning trend for an area that considers itself to be mostly agricultural. This raises some important issues. Why can’t we export food instead of importing it? How is it that areas with similarly harsh weather patterns can send food to Sub-Saharan Africa?
We’re taught that if you keep doing the same thing and getting the same outcomes, it’s time to change. Rainfed agriculture is one of the things we need to wean ourselves off of in order to embrace technology that will ensure our food security. Communities must create and adopt more harsh-weather-resistant food kinds. Adoption of new, cost-effective irrigation methods is also critical.
African leaders must stop talking about agriculture in inexpensive hotels while eating imported wheat flour and veggies and instead go down to the ground and assist their people to embrace contemporary agricultural practices.
Villages may be arranged in such a manner that they cultivate what they are excellent at, employing weather-resistant cultivars as well as improved irrigation methods.
It’s also important to prevent post-harvest losses. We can’t even preserve what we cultivate in many areas of Africa. In places like Uganda, you’ll discover that during some seasons, there are so many fruits and vegetables that farmers are giving them away for free, but within a month, the same items are scarce.
What makes building a warehouse with enough coolers to store veggies for a few more weeks so difficult? What’s so tough about planting a tomato paste plant in a tomato-growing region? Instead, our shops are stocked with imported tomato paste from outside of Africa.
