By Prossy Nandudu
The selling of maize from the gardens without proper harvesting, drying, testing and packaging is one of the reasons most grain is rejected on the market, grain experts have said.
When maize is sold in gardens, it may not have dried properly and that means it can easily get mouldy or rotten, it may be harvested and dropped on the soil creating room for microorganisms including the fungus that promotes the development of aflatoxins in the grain.
At the same time, there are no tests to ascertain the quality of the grains because all the transactions are in the garden.
The practice has led to the rejection of maize from Uganda by other regional markets on grounds of poor quality and contamination, associated with aflatoxins.
The observation was made by Emmanuel Asiimwe, the country manager of the Eastern Africa Grain Council, during the 10th Africa Grain Summit at Speke Resort Munyonyo in Kampala on Thursday.
The summit attracted technology promoters from Brazil, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Ethiopia and eastern and southern Africa, among others.
“You cannot have people walking into the country, driving trucks to Bweyale, buying maize from the garden and driving back. Nobody tracks them, nobody controls quality. It is because of that informal setting that whenever you try to improve standards, you still have problems,” Asiimwe said.
He added that because of the informal sector, the banks are cagey on whether they should invest their money in grain trade or not because the risk of rejection by the market is higher.
“So, the formalisation of the grain sector is something that we should find solutions not tomorrow but today that is when we can attract technology developers to address issues such as aflatoxin contamination and other quality challenges,” Asiimwe added.
For example, early this year 70 trucks of maize destined for South Sudan were rejected and remained at Nimule Border point for close to two months after the government of S.Sudan alleged that the maize in the trucks was contaminated with aflatoxins, said to be poisonous and that these lead to the development of liver cancer, immunity suppression, stuntedness and death in livestock, among others.
In 2018, Kenya rejected 600,000 tonnes of maize from Uganda due to poor quality and aflatoxin contamination among other rejections.
Information from the International Food Policy Research Institute and the National Agriculture Research Organisation indicates that 40% of commodities in local African markets exceed maximum levels of aflatoxins in foods and that Uganda loses up to $38 million annually in export trade due to aflatoxin.
How other countries are addressing the challenge
According to Asiimwe, the Tanzanian government has issued directives banning foreigners from accessing grain gardens to buy grains from the farmers.
One of the directives is that for one to buy maize as a foreign trader or company, they have to register as a local company in Tanzania, obtain a trade export licence and get a phytosanitary certificate before the grain can be exported out of Tanzania.
And that no foreign company will be allowed into Tanzania’s gardens to buy grain.
Apart from the directive, the Tanzania government has injected funds into the Tanzania Grain Reserve Agency to buy the grains and keep it their silos for buyers to buy them from there.
“Through this summit, we want to engage our policymakers to form a policy direction on how informal grain trade can be managed to bring about sanity in the trade of grains,” he added.
Other challenges faced by the sector include reluctance by Ugandan grain traders to make use of the existing grain standards and yet Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda have enforced the adherence of standards.
Officiating the opening of the summit on Thursday, commissioner in charge of Micro Small and Medium Enterprises Joshua Mutambi advised grain sector players to adhere to the set standards both national and regional that govern grain trade in order to compete in the regional market.
To meet the standards, he advised sector players to embrace the various technologies that were exhibited at the summit like hematic storage bags, pics storage bags which smallholder farmers can use for storing grains, grain driers by Perry Engineering, Aflatoxin management technology by IGrain, machinery for smallholder farmers by Braz Afric, plastics and metallic silos by the World Food Programme, among others.
Mutambi added that currently, Uganda produces 5metric tons of grain with maize taking the bigger percentage, of which half of it is consumed locally and the rest exported, earning the country between sh8 to 10bn annually.
