Farmers in Jinja district have turned to agricultural zoning to curb land fragmentation.
The farmers have small plots of land for subsistence use after most of them hired out their land for sugarcane growing. They cannot grow food to sustain their families and have surplus for sale.
Sulaiman Mwangu, a farmer in Nakabango has seven acres of land. He uses five acres for sugarcane growing and two acres for other activities.
On his land he rears chicken, grows bananas, pineapples, maize and vegetables. He says dividing his garden into small plots with different crops has enabled him have enough food for his home, while he can sell some bananas to earn extra money.
Mwangu says he has managed this through irrigation and use of modern agricultural practices.
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Daniel Muwanga, chairman Jinja farmer’s forum, says after the problem of land fragmentation threatened food security in homes, farmers had to be taught new and better methods of farming. Now farmers in Butagaya, Budondo and Buyengo sub counties have turned to zoning their gardens.
Fred Ngobi Gume, Jinja Local Council Five chairman, says the district must come up with by-laws on land usage where a proportion of land has to be allocated to food growing. He says most homes cannot grow food to have two meals a day.
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Sulaiman Bagalana, Jinja District Agricultural officer, says zoning is the best way to go for Jinja farmers basing on the soils, per capita land holding and the climate. A small piece of land in Jinja can have a huge harvest for farmers if the right farming procedures are followed.
He says this has a lot of benefits in terms of marketing and agricultural extension.
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While meeting members of the Busoga Parliamentary Group early this week, President Yoweri Museveni asked the legislators to strongly decampaign the act of land fragmentation. Museveni described it as backward does not take care of the productivity and economic benefits of land as a factor of production.
Museveni noted that in a country like Uganda whose big percentage of the population depends on agriculture for survival, it was suicidal to fragment the land because it affects its production potential thereby condemning the population to poverty.
He told the Busoga MPs that one major cause of poverty in the sub-region was land fragmentation and stressed the need to urgently sensitize the population to appreciate the fact that in modern capitalistic world, land is meant to produce wealth for the family or land owners.
