The Minister for Relief and Disaster Preparedness Hon Hilary Onek has trashed the claims by the World Food Program (WFP) over the poor quality of food in Uganda.
According to the Minster, Uganda has for many years been known for its quality food that has not only fed its citizens and refugees but also attracted foreign trade with her East African neighbors.
“Uganda is exporting massively to her neighbors. The only recent encounter with Kenya was mainly brought up by the desire for Kenyans to also protect their market,” said minster.
He added that the WFP also free to import the needed technology to test the quality of food with in the country in case they had any quarries.
Onek also noted that because the government had done its part by offering a conductive environment for the reception and delivery of humanitarian assistance to the refugees, it was expecting the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Community to also do same in the spirit of burden sharing.
He therefore expressed his total disagreement towards the WFP for always purchasing its food produce from the international market and not considering the local farmer’s produce to feed the refugees and host communities.
“If these people are coming to our country why do we have to import food to feed them? All these Ugandans you see including me tall as l am are feeding on our local farmer’s food but we haven’t died,” Onek said.
Adding that Uganda had its own food and that if WFP wasn’t willing to purchase Ugandan food, then they needed to consider feeding the refugees elsewhere.
Minister also stressed that Uganda’s food quality shouldn’t be the reason why local farmers always toil and suffer to get market for their produce more so that even officials from WFP buy their own food from Ugandan market
He regarded this as a way of protecting foreign market in America and their partners elsewhere and that the officials wanted the money to remain in those countries. Something that Uganda was not willing to adhere to anymore and also advocated for a strong market as well
Onek also promised to engage the cabinet on this issue sighting that it was a matter of national importance and therefore needed urgent response from government
The disturbing statements came in yesterday during a joint press conference at the Media Centre as the minister was applauding the Japanese governments’ contribution towards the development of in the refugee hosting communities in areas of the West Nile.
The Japanese Ambassador to Uganda H.E Hidemoto Fakuzawa had also revealed this year’s contribution of approximately 36 billion shilling adding to the 127billion shillings that was donated since 2016.
This aid was to help support the refugee and host communities especially five sectors which included; infrastructure development, increasing the income of farmers through mainly rice growing and irrigation, education, health and working with international NGOs
However, H.E Rosa Malango UN Resident Coordinator, retaliated ministers statements noting that the UN together with her partners had engaged the government including; First Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister for Trade, Local Government, Agriculture and Chairperson for The National Drug Authority (NDA) as part of the National Convening Team on concerns of food security
“We launched the county’s dialogue on Food System in Uganda last Friday and one of the issues to tackle there was the poor quality of post-harvest handling, she said
Adding that, that was the only reason why despite investing for several years, they had not been able to purchase locally in Uganda
The dialogues were to be held in different regions.
Malango also stressed that the WFP, FAO, IFAD among others were already working at the community levels to increase post-harvest handling to help sustain purchases where possible.
This was to see how to expand on the quality of local produce as close as possible to the parish model which was in line with government Agro-industrialization program of NDPIII.
“We are looking forward to increasing the scale as we increase in quality and make it a contribution that UN is making towards implementing another strategic development goals (SDGs) in Uganda,” said Malango
Back ground
In 2020, WFP actually bought food worth 37.3 million (113,000 metric tons) through WFP Agriculture Market Support Program.
The organization has also worked with farmers in different Cooperatives to support and train them in the aggregation of food so that it can get the matric tones it needs to provide to the refugees and the people in the host community.
WFP even initiated a program last week dubbed Karamoja feeds Karamoja for school feeding, with the aim of buying food that is grown locally in Karamoja.
Therefore all funds WFP will receive for schools in Karamoja will directly go to local farmers, thus increasing on the metric tons of food bought in Uganda
The organization also made 40% food cut (30% last year) due to the shortage of resources of about $86M from the $220M that is required in 2021 to be able to provide food for the over 1.4 M refugees in Uganda.
