A great analy­sis from Uganda’s The Mon­i­tor tries to look into the root causes of hunger in the nation. In her piece, author Eve­lyn Lirri looks into sev­eral fac­tors such as the armed con­flict, peo­ple too poor to pur­chase food, fail­ures of gov­ern­ment, and cli­mate change.

For our snip­pet, we focus on the inabil­ity to pur­chase food and pop­u­la­tion growth, but we encour­age you to give the full arti­cle a read. We found the analy­sis at All Africa.

While the num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing in abject poverty — described as liv­ing on less than a dol­lar, or Shs2,100 a day — has fallen from 56 per cent in 1992 to about 30 per cent today, the sub­sis­tence nature of the country’s agri­cul­tural sec­tor means many do not have cash incomes to buy food when needed.

Many of those with a cash income have sim­ply been priced out of the food mar­ket. Fig­ures from the Uganda Bureau of Sta­tis­tics show that infla­tion hit dou­ble dig­its ear­lier this year on the back of high food prices as drought and exports to lucra­tive emerg­ing mar­kets put pres­sure on food supplies.

Food infla­tion, accord­ing to the Uganda Bureau of Sta­tis­tics (Ubos) stood at 23.8 per cent for the year end­ing May 2009. The ris­ing food prices were ini­tially a bless­ing to pro­duc­ers, says State Min­is­ter for Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Refugees, Musa Ecweru.

“The risk has been that at times they sell almost every­thing and at the end of the day, the money they have is not able to buy food when there is a cri­sis,” he said.

Accord­ing to Prof. Nuwagaba, while offi­cial fig­ures put the num­ber of Ugan­dans employed in the agri­cul­tural sec­tor at 70 per cent, the real­ity on the ground shows many young peo­ple are quit­ting agri­cul­ture for petty jobs in urban cen­tres like rid­ing boda boda (motor­cy­cle taxis).
…

Another prob­lem con­tribut­ing to Uganda’s hunger is the unchecked pop­u­la­tion which is cur­rently grow­ing at 3.2 per cent annu­ally, says Prof. Nuwagaba.

This means that every 20 years, the pop­u­la­tion is expected to dou­ble and by 2025, the pop­u­la­tion will be 56 mil­lion and 106 mil­lion peo­ple by 2050.

Pro­jec­tions for the year 2000 to 2050 indi­cate that a grow­ing pop­u­la­tion will increase pres­sure on the avail­able land. At the cur­rent growth rate, pop­u­la­tion den­sity, which is around 124 peo­ple per square kilo­me­tre, will reach 233 in 2025 and 438 in 2050. Increas­ing land con­flicts across the coun­try are prob­a­bly a pointer of things to come.

This pop­u­la­tion growth has not been matched by growth in food pro­duc­tion; a coun­try which had only five mil­lion peo­ple and was self-sufficient in food when the first cen­sus was car­ried out in 1948, is now on the brink of star­va­tion as its tries to feed more peo­ple from a finite size of land with­out man­ag­ing the elements.

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