By Henry Sekanjako
The Kenyan government has sent a team of agriculture experts from the Uganda’s agriculture ministry.
The visit by the officials is for them to learn how best the country can develop a joint national agro-ecology strategy.
Agroecology promotes and enhances sustainable food systems that can build resilience in agrarian communities, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improves food security and nutrition.
Drawing on the Ugandan experiences, especially in the field of agroecology, Kenya also wants to benchmark Uganda’s policies in the area of organic agriculture.
“We have a strategy that we are working on, part of it is creating an enabling policy, promoting practices of agro-ecological practices, consumption on good diets, issues of research and innovation,” David Ombalo, a policy analyst, at Kenya’s Ministry of agriculture and livestock, said.
Speaking during a five-day dialogue on issues relating to the development of the joint national agroecology strategy in Kampala, Ombalo said the benchmark study in Uganda is also aimed at finding ways on how the Kenyan government can interest the youth in Kenya, into agriculture.
According to Ombalo, Kenyan youth have continued to shun the agriculture sector, opting for other sectors such as the ICT sector for quick gains.
“The learning is to interest the youthful population into agriculture, they are not very keen on agriculture, because they say agriculture is not sexy, they don’t find it attractive, there are a lot of things associated with it and this is not where the youth want to be, they want Hi-tech, quick money, not monies that trickle in slowly,” he said.
Josephine Akia Luyimbazi, the country co-ordinator of Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM-Uganda) said to promote agroecology, there is need for smallholder farmers by tapping into and documenting their wealth of indigenous knowledge.
Representing PELUM Kenya, Mary Irungo, the programmes officer in charge of advocacy, said the Kenyan delegation, which included officials from the agriculture ministry, members of the academia and civil society, is interested in drawing lessons on how the Ugandan Government supports agroecology and how it also partners with civil society organisations (CSOs) to promote agroecology.
According to Irungo, it is the dream of Kenya to see how agroecology policies can be formulated and above all, implemented at the national level.
“We want to learn how CSOs are working with the Government to ensure implementation of the policies in place, how agroecology can be incorporated in the education curriculum. There are universities who have some [course] units on agroecology, but we understand in Uganda, Uganda matters offer degrees in agroecology, and now, we would love to see that being integrated into the education back in Kenya,” Irungo said.
Organic agriculture
The Kenyan Government also wants to learn how it can better its organic farming to increase its exports and market of organic products.
member country board PELUM Uganda Allan Ssebulime said statistics by the finance ministry show that 17.1% of Uganda’s agricultural exports are organic products.
“Indeed, organic agriculture is one of the key income earners in Uganda and when we hear that you are benchmarking around agroecology and organic agriculture we are delighted and we hope it will be fruitful sharing,” Ssebulime said.
The organisation (PELUM) has a membership of 68 members, and its core is agroecology and organic agriculture.
