Uganda’s exports boom as Sudan, Congo open up

A boom in Uganda’s exports to regional and foreign markets has generated significant gains for various sectors in the country.

According to results from the recent Presidential Export Awards for 2007, exporters of agricultural related products, construction materials and consumer goods registered huge earnings compared with printing and artwork-related products.

The vibrant performance is largely attributed to rapidly rising demand in regional markets such as Southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda coupled with rising prices for various commodities on the world market in recent months.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) believes the rapid rise in commodities, especially from Africa, has been driven by overwhelming demand from China and India for industrial purposes and limited supply caused by low investment in production facilities.

“Growing demand encountered supply constraints because, during the period of relatively low prices in the 1990s, investment in new capacity has been low in the oil and mineral sectors.

“Although investment in exploration and new production capacity has increased since 2002, it has met with severe technological and geological constraints, so that the supply response so far has been week,” reads Unctad’s Trade and Development Report for 2008.

Nevertheless, Uganda is keen on improving performance in weak areas such as the honey sector, which some analysts believe is heavily underexploited in terms of quantity and revenue output.

“This is one of the efforts at diversifying exports. Uganda is one of the few African countries that have been allowed to export honey to the European Union market out of 27 countries that applied.

“In line with that, Uganda is currently leading the group of honey exporting countries to the EU,” said Florence Kata, executive director of Uganda Export Promotion Board.

Uganda exported 50,000 tonnes of honey worth $60 million in 2005. Some exporters says the sector can produce 500,000 tonnes per annum.

Vibrant earnings in the agricultural sector were largely reflected by coffee exports, which, however, reduced from 4.2 million bags in the period 1997/98 to 2.4 million bags by the end of 2006, representing a 43 per cent drop mainly because of the coffee wilt disease.

However, coffee exports experienced a slight increase in 2007, hitting 2.7 million bags.