One of the first experiences in Uganda was our trip to the rural village, which I really think opened all of our eyes. We got to witness how more than 60% of the population lives in the country first hand. My favorite part of the day, and maybe even the whole trip, was seeing all the children wave and smile at us. Since I live in a town that does a lot of farming, it was also very interesting to see how it is done in Africa.
Agriculture is very important to sustainable development, and can arguably be related to every SDG goal. We learned that cocoa is a very important part in Ugandan economy, but that they export their raw goods to outside countries just to buy back the finished product at a much higher price. Another issue Ugandan agriculture faces is that most of the farms are small, and every crop is grown and harvested by hand. This leads to sustenance farming, or farming that only can feed the family that owns it. Fixing these problems would help sustainable development throughout the country.
A couple questions to ponder upon...
Would it be beneficial for Uganda to cut out the middle man and start producing final products within it's own country?
Although America has perfected large scale farming, large scale farming is not always the best solution to every country. Would Uganda benefit from large scale farming?
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There are a lot of things that need to happen in the development of Uganda before it will be able to cut out the middle men in the processing of cocoa and coffee, a few being increased infrastructure and access to electricity. I don't believe that Uganda would benefit from large scale farming because the crops that Uganda produces need to be picked by hand. Also the land plot sizes along with lack of irrigation that requires the mixing of different plants both makes machines unusable.
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