For how long will our farmers use the hand hoe?

By Michael J. Ssali
Posted 


Wednesday, June 29  

2016 at 

01:00

There is a lot of debate nowadays about the possibility of Uganda becoming a middle income country by 2020. However, other than debating this, we should strive to become a ‘middle class’ income country in the next five years.
In an essay titled “What it means to be middle class today?” published in US News, Geoff Williams says there is no universally recognised definition of middle class.

By 2021 anyway, with hard work, we should expect a Uganda where the majority have personal good housing, a car, good health care and retirement benefits, parents capable of paying their children’s university tuition and able to enjoy a holiday or two perhaps visiting a foreign country.
We should be reducing the percentage of the farming population by enlarging and mechanising our farms.
We cannot continue doing all agricultural work by hand and using basic tools like a hand hoe.

According to The World Bank estimates, there are around five tractors for every 1,000 farmers in Africa and about 1,600 tractors for one thousand farmers in the US.
Only about five per cent of the population in the US are engaged in farming while here about 80 per cent are farmers, mainly using the hand hoe.
Due to our traditional inheritance system in which children have to sub-divide and share the small plots of their dead parents our gardens get smaller, more depleted, and less productive.
A big number of our so-called farmers are too poor to afford their own inputs including hoes and seeds and they have to wait for the government to supply them.

Without mechanised irrigation coming easily and with the onset of climate change our youths are quickly recognising that farming is not so profitable and are running from the villages (rural areas) to the towns (urban areas).
The position of African Union, according to the Malabo Declaration, is that to accelerate agricultural growth in Africa farmers must turn to mechanisation.
And this is the reason that Ms Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, AU Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture, has consistently spoken against the dependency of the majority of African farmers on the hand hoe.

E-mail: ssalimichaelj@gmail.com