ADJUMANI – In a bid to end malnutrition among refugees and host communities, especially among children below five years in Adjumani district, landlords are donating land for communal farming to scale up the production of nutritious food crops.
The landlords in the district, working with political leaders and other stakeholders, have since 2020 offered more than 3000 acres of land to both refugees and members of the host communities for the growing of nutritious food crops.
The initiative has helped many refugees fight hunger and supplement the little food and cash support they receive from United Nations High Commission for Refugees [UNHCR] and World Food Programme. [WFP].
Anne Mandera, a mother of five and refugee who settled in Pagirinya Two Block E, Refugee Settlement, fled her country South Sudan in 2016. She is in a group of 10 people using communal land to grow food crops and is thankful she can now support her family.
Mandera says she planted cassava last year. Currently, she is harvesting, with the first sales earning her close to Shs 500,000.
“I have now sold 10 sacks of cassava each sack is sold at Shs 70,000, I have 6 sacks of dry cassava which I have stored at home for feeding the family,” Mandera said.
Mandera said. “The cassava I planted had helped me because now I can pay school fees and buy other essential commodities.”
Mandera said if it was not for the land offered to her, she would not manage to feed the five children because of the reduced food ratio given to them.
Lucy Asienzo, 35, and mother of 7, planted cassava on an acre and has harvested half of the acre, earning Shs 1 million.
Landlords speak out on land allocation
Anthony Kinyara, a landlord in Pagirinya Village who has offered 64 acres of land for communal farming to be shared between refugees and host communities said he was motivated to donate his land for communal farming because of the shortage of food in the area.
“There is too much hunger, there is no food to eat for both the nationals and refugees and yet I have land which is idle. I felt like people should use the land and produce their own food given that prices of food items in the markets have gone up,” he said.
Another landlord from Jurumini village in Ajugopi Parish Dzaipi Sub-county, Emmanuel Mamawi who also doubles as the LCI chairperson of Jurumini village said they offered 360 acres of land to be shared among the refugees and host community to practice communal farming.
“We decided as a community to donate the land because the land was not in use and yet we are sleeping hungry. We also had no capacity to open this land on our own,” he said.
He added: “We shall now grow enough food, most of our children have been underfeeding and because of the refugees, the food in the market is not enough to feed all of us.”
New refugee arrival
Uganda has received 71,016 new arrivals of refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan from the beginning of 2022 to June 23.
From the last reporting period in March, in the last three months additional 17,950 new arrivals were received.
According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees UNHCR and the office of the Prime Minister OPM, out of the 17,950 new arrivals 3,892 entered through the west Nile while 14,058 entered through South Western Uganda.
Partners contribution
The advocacy and communications coordinator and the program manager for the Right to Grow Project under Action Against Hunger [ACF] Mariam Akiror stated that they are implementing a five-year project aimed at reducing stunting among children below the age of 5 years.
She added that under the project they are encouraging refugees to use the land optimally as they grow nutritious food crops in the small plots of land allocated to them in the settlement.
“As Action Against Hunger, ours is to facilitate the project and the work is done by the district stakeholders. The project is supporting both refugees and host communities and we have grouped them in groups of 10 to 30 members,” Akiror said, adding 1,620 farmers, half being refugees.
“We have facilitated to buy the conventional bread nutritious biofortified seeds like the rich iron beans, vitamin A maize, The orange flesh sweet potatoes. We have also encouraged them to grow nutritious staple foods like the soya beans, cassava, groundnuts, simsim, and sorghum.”
OPM
Titus Jogo the refugee desk officer in charge of Adjumani, Obongi Moyo, and Lamwo refugee settlements said the intervention to have communal farming is a welcome idea that can improve food security.
The Dzaipi Sub-county LCIII chairperson, James Ondoga said they have mobilised both the refugees and community members where they have offered 1573 acres of land for food crop growing, saying it will go a long way in fighting malnutrition, which is very high in the area.
Ondoga said his sub-county faces with acute hunger and prices of food have gone high, making the majority of the people have one meal, a day.
He is concerned that the number of refugees in his area keeps increasing. “We are hosting 99,601 refugees who are three times more than us the nationals. We are only 22,215 people in Dzaipi Subcounty where there is food shortage,” Ondonga said.
In 2016, Uganda offered to pilot the comprehensive refugee response framework [CRRF] with the objective of supporting government policy and protecting asylum space, supporting resilience, and self-reliance of refugees and host communities.
UNHCR intervention
In November 2020, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees [UNHCR] launched Uganda’s first commercial farm for refugees and host communities at Aliwara Village.
This followed a memorandum of understanding between the refugees and host communities in June 2020 in which they agreed to engage in commercial maize production for seven years on the 2,000-acre piece of land.
South Sudanese refugees in Adjumani district recently embarked on commercial maize and beans production and have so far reaped 64 metric tons of maize and the same quantity of beans from their first harvest.
There are approximately 236,000 refugees settled in 19 facilities spread across Adjumani, according to UNHCR. The district together with UNHCR plans to sell the maize and beans to either the local produce buyers supported by DRDIP or processors within the district.
Global hunger situation
Last month a joint report published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development [IFAD], the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN World Food Programme [WFP], and the World Health Organization [WHO] indicates that the number of people affected by hunger globally rose to as many as 828mlnn in 2021, an increase of about 46mln since 2020 and 150mlnn since the outbreak of the covid-19 Pandemic.
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