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The peasantry remain poor, while farming experts turn drug dealers

Sunday January 15 2012
mutebi

As usual, the Christmas season allowed us to escape from town and take the children away from television and other mind-bending gadgetry.

Two weeks away from all these things teaches them about life elsewhere, and that it is a perfectly good alternative to urban living and its sometimes corrupting artificialities.

They have grown to like it.

The village has scores of wild plants, insects and birds to look at, flowers to pick, and animals, big and small, to watch and, from time to time, touch and feel.

This Christmas, they had the added bonus of watching with fascination an uncle, an émigré animal health scientist, examine, vaccinate, and treat different types of livestock for a variety of conditions.

In town, they would have had no chance of watching all that at close range and learning about animal medicine.  

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As for me, I again had a chance to observe and experience how village people spend their time and what issues preoccupy them.

It provided further insights into why poverty in rural areas can be so persistent and difficult to eradicate.

Throughout the period I have spent working as a social scientist, by now the better part of a decade and a half, I have encountered situations that shed ample light on why poor people remain poor.

As anyone with interest in the subject knows, government failure is at the heart of the matter.

For people to exit from poverty or at the very least to have realistic chances of doing so, they must be healthy. For this to happen, they should be adequately protected from the causes of ill health. The most effective weapon here is health education.

It entails telling people what they have to do to minimise their chances of falling ill, especially with conditions that interfere with their capacity to engage in income-generating and livelihood-enhancing activities.

Second, should they fall ill, the infrastructure for restoring them to good health should be in place.  In much of rural Uganda, these pre-conditions remain largely absent. And so the poor remain poor. 

However, good health is only the beginning.

The ability of poor people to lift themselves out of poverty also depends on their possession of productive assets, especially land.

In Uganda, there are many poor people condemned to live in chronic poverty by landlessness caused by a multitude of factors that governments, through a combination of incompetence, political calculation and incapacity, have always failed to tackle.

However, there are also the landed poor who sit on acres upon acres of land without a clue how to use it productively beyond growing a handful of things largely for their own consumption.

At a certain time during Uganda’s history, they would have been perfect candidates for advice by agronomists and agricultural extension workers.

Conversations with some of these potentially wealthy poor people reveal that such experts, of whom they used to see many during colonial rule and shortly thereafter, have not been seen for decades.  

Remarkably, the current government has such people on its payroll.

What is not clear is what on earth they do, where and how well they do it, and for whom. There are also those who try to venture into animal husbandry, experimenting with keeping mainly small ruminants and chickens, the more ambitious venturing into cattle.

Easily preventable and curable animal diseases alongside lack of supporting infrastructure, including animal health specialists, cattle dips and cheap vaccines, are big obstacles to success.

They help trap otherwise motivated individuals in poverty that they could otherwise have escaped through their own efforts and initiatives. 

Strangely enough, Uganda trains large numbers of professionals in fields related to agriculture, people who should help solve these problems.

So why do they not? The answer is rather longwinded. To arrive at it, we must first ask what happens to them after they graduate. Some find jobs with local governments all over the country.

Others, not many, venture into private practice, selling their expertise to those who can afford it.

Others leave the country, taking their know-how with them.

Others, at least the animal health experts, become “drug dealers.” None of these categories is available to serve the very poor.  

The professionals working for local governments are too few to cover the areas they are meant to cover and often lack the most basic of tools, equipment, and facilities, including transport.

Private practitioners are beyond the reach of farmers without money for fees.

Those unwilling to work for local governments and to face stiff competition in the small private market emigrate. Which leaves the said drug dealers.

Unable or unwilling to try the other three options, they abandon what they call “practising” and venture into the highly rewarding trade in pharmaceuticals and other agro-chemical products.

Meanwhile, one hears politicians and policy makers who cannot solve already existing small problems talk of how poverty must be fought through grand and complex strategies such as agricultural mechanisation and the elimination of peasant agriculture. 

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