On May 8th 2019, during a nationwide sensitization campaign on poverty eradication, NRM party chairman President Yoweri Museveni presented a paper themed “Four sectors and the Seven ways for wealth and jobs creation” in which he pointed out commercial agriculture; industries (big or small); services (hotels, transport, professional services, shops, etc.); and ICT (Business Process Outsourcing -BPOs) as the four sectors for wealth and jobs creation which his NRM party have been preaching to Ugandans since 1995.
Mr Museveni noted that 68% of homesteads in Uganda are still in subsistence farming (growing crops only for food), which he calls “a sentence to poverty for those families that have not woken up.” “Within agriculture, there are four ways of doing commercial activities.
These are: the four acres plan; the micro-activities for those that no longer have the four acres; the medium and large scale farmers; and the plantation agriculture,” Mr Museveni notes.
The four acres plan Museveni recommends 7 activities on account of high returns per acre, per annum.
● One acre for clonal coffee
● One acre for fruits (mangoes, oranges and pineapples)
● One acre for food crops for the family (cassava, bananas, upland rice or irrigation rice, Irish potatoes, sorghum or millet)
● One acre for pasture for dairy cattle (8 of them); poultry for eggs in the backyard piggery; and fish farming.
Projected returns
Coffee, in one acre, can give Shs18million and fruits – Shs12million; milk, Shs 8million. “With poultry and piggery, the sky is the limit because, as long as you buy food for them, in the backyard, you can keep a large number of chicken and pigs.”
Mr Museveni recommended that families with less than four acres can engage in poultry, piggery, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, some zero-grazing dairy cattle, apples and grapes.
While families with 6 acres and above can use 4 acres for coffee, fruits, food crop, dairy farming, pigs, poultry, fish-farming). They can also produce low value crops like sugar-cane, cotton, tobacco, maize, etc and on the other two acres in addition to the high value activities.
His 4th way is for plantation owners with a lot of land to use it for an industrial mono-crop: sugar-cane, tea, palm oil, etc with assistance from government.
Hence, the four ways out of the seven of creating wealth and jobs, are in agriculture. Coffee, in one acre, can give Shs 18million and fruits.
“With poultry and piggery, the sky is the limit because, as long as you buy food for them, in the backyard, you can keep a large number of chicken and pigs.”
5th way is industries – big and small.
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