BUSHENYI, October 27, 2026 – As Uganda marks World Food Day, the country finds itself at a deeply sobering crossroads. In our urban centres and the lush hills of western Uganda, markets overflow with golden matooke, fresh milk and heaps of vibrant vegetables. Yet, just a few hundred kilometres away, in the windswept plains of the Karamoja Sub-region, hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens wake up to face another day of acute hunger.
The 2025 Global Hunger Index classifies Uganda’s hunger situation as “serious”, while the country ranks 157th out of 193 countries on the Human Development Index.
This is Uganda’s great food paradox. We are a nation blessed with fertile soils, two rainy seasons and an open-door refugee policy that has seen us generously host more than 1.9 million refugees.
Yet, recent data from the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification [IPC] paints a grim picture: an estimated 3.6 million Ugandans are experiencing IPC Phase 3 [Crisis] or worse levels of acute food insecurity.
The foundations of our food systems are increasingly coming under pressure from climate variability, changing generational attitudes towards agriculture and declining soil fertility.
This situation calls for honest reflection on how we feed ourselves, who bears the greatest burden of food production and why collective action through agricultural cooperatives offers one of the most viable paths towards sustainable food security.
A visit to a typical rural household today reveals a profound social transformation. A generation ago, farming was a collective family responsibility. A household of ten people would head to the gardens or fields together [omusiri in Runyankole], working side by side to ensure that the family granary remained full.
Today, that picture has fundamentally changed. Driven by the search for quick money and the desire to escape the backbreaking nature of traditional hand-hoe farming, many young people are abandoning agriculture.
They are moving to trading centres to operate boda-bodas, run retail kiosks or seek informal employment in towns and cities, with some ending up in prostitution [Obwamaraya].
Findings from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics [UBOS] point to a significant shift in the country’s employment structure. Service-related occupations now account for a national average of 50.5 percent of employment, while agriculture, forestry and fishing have fallen to second place, employing just 37.1 percent of the population.
Consequently, the burden of supporting rural households has increasingly fallen on fewer economically productive members. In a household of ten people, it is often just one or two members, usually women, who remain actively engaged in farming.
Statistics reveal an equally troubling reality. According to UBOS gender profiles, only 5 percent of female-headed agricultural households use inorganic fertilisers, while a mere 18.6 percent have access to agricultural extension services.
Women contribute more than 75 percent of total agricultural labour and undertake 90 percent of primary food processing, yet they own only a small fraction of the land they cultivate.
We have created a precarious situation in which entire households depend on the exhausting, often unpaid labour of a single mother or grandmother for their daily meals.
The number of mouths to feed continues to grow, while the number of hands available to cultivate the land steadily declines.
To make matters worse, the very soil on which these women depend is increasingly losing its productive capacity.
For decades, we have treated Uganda’s soils as an inexhaustible resource. However, continuous cultivation without adequate soil restoration, coupled with mounting population pressure, has resulted in severe nutrient depletion.
Our land is becoming exhausted. Without sufficient fallow periods to allow natural recovery, and with fertiliser application rates remaining among the lowest in the world, at just 2 to 3 kilogrammes per hectare, crop yields have fallen to less than 40 percent of their potential.
When heavy rains fall, they often wash away exposed and degraded topsoil instead of replenishing the land. During droughts, depleted soils lack sufficient organic matter to retain moisture, causing crops to wither within weeks.
One or two women working in isolation on nutrient-depleted soils cannot reasonably be expected to produce enough food to sustain a large household.
This helps explain why even a slight delay in seasonal rainfall can quickly escalate into a regional food security emergency.
Ugandans cannot afford to continue waiting for emergency food relief whenever drought strikes. A sustainable response to our food security challenges requires collective, modern and strategically organised agricultural production, supported by effective national policies.
This is precisely why cooperatives matter.
Agricultural cooperatives provide an institutional framework through which vulnerable, isolated subsistence farmers can transform themselves into a strong, organised and commercially viable force.
Through cooperatives, smallholder farmers can more effectively implement the 4-Acre Model championed by H.E. President Yoweri Museveni.
While an individual household may struggle to establish and manage a diversified farm, cooperatives enable communities to coordinate production and allocate land efficiently for cash crops such as coffee, fruit production, dairy pasture and staple food crops.
Such coordination can improve productivity, strengthen household incomes and ensure that commercial agriculture does not come at the expense of food production.
Furthermore, individual financial allocations under the Parish Development Model [PDM] are often insufficient to enable beneficiaries to acquire modern agricultural infrastructure for their enterprises.
Nevertheless, I believe the PDM represents an important first step towards transforming subsistence households into commercially productive enterprises. In our local expression, this is gear number one [Giya number emwe].
For instance, when 50 farmers pool their PDM revolving funds through a cooperative Savings and Credit Cooperative Organisation [SACCO], they can mobilise sufficient capital to purchase fertilisers in bulk and invest in shared agricultural infrastructure, including solar-powered irrigation systems.
Such investments would help farmers reduce their dependence on unpredictable rainfall, improve production and strengthen their resilience to climate-related shocks.
Cooperatives are equally important in reducing risks across the agricultural value chain.
By organising themselves into strong producer groups, farmers can access professional guidance and explore financing opportunities under the Agricultural Credit Facility [ACF], administered through the Bank of Uganda.
This facility provides access to relatively affordable agricultural financing, with interest rates capped at 12 percent, which may otherwise be beyond the reach of individual smallholder farmers.
Access to affordable credit can enable farmers to invest in mechanisation, improved seed varieties, irrigation equipment, storage facilities and other technologies necessary to increase productivity.
Perhaps most importantly, cooperatives can establish parish-level agricultural aggregation hubs.
These facilities would enable farmers to collectively dry, clean, grade and store their produce, thereby reducing post-harvest losses, which can reach 40 percent because of pests, poor handling and inadequate storage.
Aggregation also strengthens farmers’ bargaining power by enabling them to market larger quantities of produce collectively, negotiate better prices and reduce their dependence on exploitative middlemen.
Rather than selling their harvests individually at distress prices, farmers can organise production, processing, storage and marketing through cooperative structures.
This approach would not only improve household incomes but also strengthen community food reserves, ensuring that adequate supplies remain available during lean seasons.
Well-managed cooperatives can also promote knowledge-sharing, improve access to agricultural extension services and encourage the adoption of sustainable farming practices, including soil conservation, crop rotation and the responsible application of fertilisers.
They can provide a practical platform for empowering rural women, who continue to shoulder the greatest responsibility for agricultural production despite facing significant barriers to land ownership, financing, technology and extension services.
However, for cooperatives to deliver these benefits, they must be built on sound governance, transparency, accountability and effective management.
Farmers must have confidence that their contributions are secure, their voices are heard and the benefits of collective investment are shared fairly.
Government, development partners and cooperative leaders must therefore work together to strengthen these institutions, improve access to affordable financing and equip members with the skills required to manage commercially viable agricultural enterprises.
Food security is not merely about the quantity of grain we harvest. It is also about the dignity of the people who produce our food and the resilience of the systems on which our communities depend.
As we reflect on World Food Day, we must commit ourselves to transforming agriculture from a symbol of rural poverty into a modern, productive and profitable agribusiness through the power of collective action.
We must support our rural women not merely through words of praise, but by mobilising them into strong, well-governed cooperatives equipped with the necessary tools, technologies, agricultural inputs and financial resources.
Uganda has enormous potential to become the breadbasket of the region. However, realising that ambition requires more than fertile soils and favourable climatic conditions.
It demands a fundamental transformation in how we organise agricultural production, support farmers, manage our natural resources and connect rural communities to profitable markets.
Above all, we must recognise that national food security cannot be built on isolated fields and the exhausted labour of a few individuals.
It must be rooted in our parishes, strengthened through reliable agricultural aggregation hubs and driven by the collective strength of our cooperatives.
The writer is the Principal Commercial Officer, Bushenyi-Ishaka Municipality.
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