A few weeks ago, a friend who is something of a guru in the agribusiness sector, told me something quite sobering.

He knows someone who has a lot of money and access to lots more. What access to what money, when and how, we shan’t go into right now. His own money and that to which he has access has allowed him to try his hand at many business ideas.

He may be known to be wealthy, but successful businessman he is not. Many of his businesses, and there is quite a string of them against his name, collapse. He is wealthy because he is an engineer of deals of all sorts. Remarkably, he does not tire of investing. And his generosity is legendary.

Rumour has it that, if you’re lucky enough to know someone who knows him personally, and you happen to have a problem or business idea he thinks is brilliant, your problem could be as good as solved.

According to my friend, in recent years, Mr Moneybags has invested a great deal of money in farming, rearing animals and growing all manner of crops. There is a fetish in Uganda about “marketable crops.”

The idea was popularised by President Yoweri Museveni and some of his advisors and has been at the centre of efforts by the government to fight poverty for many years.

Much effort and public money has gone into trying to encourage poor people to grow “marketable crops” such as passion fruit, peppers of all sorts, and others for which, the story goes, there is a lot of demand, even abroad. Mr Moneybags bought into this fetish and went into “farming” big-time.

But apparently after some years he is yet to “make any money” out of it. What he means, is that he has put in a lot but gets very little out of it.

Intrigued, he was recently heard asking other middle-class “farmers,” mainly civil servants and others who invest in farming somewhere in the countryside, hire workers to run the farms while they continue living and working in Kampala, whether they are making money.

He was interested to note that his interlocutors who like him are ‘telephone farmers’, meaning ‘farmers’ whose involvement in farming is limited to calling their employees to find out what is happening, are also not making money.

This story reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a public servant with many years of experience working in the agricultural sector. He, too, is a telephone farmer. And he, too, has invested ‘a lot’ but is not making money from his ‘farming enterprise’.

There are so many telephone farmers among Uganda’s urban elite. It seems as if anyone with any money to spare is buying land and going into farming. There are many reasons for this.

The main one is that so many people are keen to have a second and third income stream, and farming seems to be easy enough, as encouraged by significant publicity in the newspapers, for individuals who have done well out of farming.

There is a sense in which reading the stories somewhat conveys the idea that all you need to do to succeed as a farmer is have money and sink it into land and animals and crops, and then hire someone or some people to do the rest for you. Then you can continue doing whatever it is you do for a living, while money rolls in from your ‘farm’.

The desire for second and third and even fourth income stream itself springs from a certain insecurity about the future. And that in itself springs from knowledge that many people who were once successful or who conveyed the idea that they were successful, retire into poverty.

This arises from the country’s pension system having been dysfunctional for decades and the absence of a social security system that could cushion those who fall on hard times against destitution.

The rush into farming has, however, grown amidst another reality that those stampeding into agriculture have not been aware of: there is no well-developed public support infrastructure for farming.

There is a time when parastatals and state-controlled cooperatives provided support to farmers, right from training to the right seeds and other inputs, animal breeds extension services, complete with technologies of one kind or other, and even marketing.

With the collapse of parastatals and the death of cooperatives, governments ceased to be significant players in providing suitable and affordable services. Today if you want to farm, it takes more than simple interest in making money.

Starting off with deep pockets has its advantages. However, access to money alone does not solve the challenge of where to source the right knowledge, inputs and necessary services from.

Many telephone farmers run into this challenge and discover to their dismay that even the ‘open market’ is not well equipped to provide what they need to break through from investing to actually making money. But this is hardly a problem for telephone farmers alone.

There are many dedicated, hands-on farmers whose success depends on their capacity to not only find the money to invest, but also construct their own support infrastructure that previously governments provided. Clearly, farming is not for everyone.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]