From Africa Recovery, Vol.12#4 (April 1999), page 7

AIDS hits Uganda's villagers

Crops left overgrown because labour goes into caring for the sick

By Mercedes Sayagues in Kampala

No crops have been planted in the last two years in Ana Nansubuga's 3-hectare plot in Masaka district, in southern Uganda. Nearby, three brick houses are closed up with boards. Ms. Nansubuga's eight children and their spouses are dead. Most had AIDS. Of 17 grandchildren, five have died of AIDS.

Ms. Nansubuga, 81 years old, looks after 11 children, aged 8 to 14. Relatives took the eldest away when he turned 18 and the land has lain idle since. The children are too young and she is too old to farm.

Ugandan society is patrilineal: the wife moves in with the husband but does not inherit his land. So Ms. Nansubuga's late husband's family will not let her sell the plot. But, because of AIDS, they lack hands to farm it and the children are hungry.

Today, an estimated 9.5 per cent of Uganda's 19 million people are infected with HIV. Half a million have died in the last decade. "In some villages, only children are left," says Ms. Connie Magomu Masaba, an officer with the Ministry of Agriculture. "AIDS has a big impact on the farming world."

AIDS is usually seen in terms of public health costs and losses of skilled labour. But its effects on smallholder agriculture, although less obvious, are equally severe. "Global and regional AIDS conferences held since the mid-1980s rarely focus on the impact of the epidemic on rural livelihoods," concluded a conference on AIDS and African smallholder agriculture held in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1998. Declining life expectancy (Uganda's dropped from 52 years in 1980 to 42 today) makes headlines. Declining food security does not.

Agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of Uganda's gross domestic product, 95 per cent of exports and 40 per cent of government revenue. Eighty per cent of the work force is employed in agriculture, and most are smallholders.

When a man is taken ill, the wife who nurses him lacks time to properly weed the maize field, mulch and pare the banana trees, dry the coffee, or harvest the rice. This means less food and less income from cash crops. Trips to town for medical treatment, hospital fees and medicines consume any savings. Traditional healers are paid with goats and chickens. When the man dies, farm tools are sold to pay burial expenses. Ritual mourning practices forbid farming for up to seven days. Precious time for farm chores is lost.

Unable to hire casual labour, in the next season the family plants a smaller area. Without pesticides, weeds and bugs multiply. Children drop out of school to weed, harvest, and shoo away crop-eating baboons and birds. Again, yields decline. With little homegrown food and without cash to buy fish or meat, family health suffers. If the mother becomes ill with AIDS, the cycle of asset and labour loss is repeated, often at a short interval.

One study found that in the last 10 years in three communities with different farming systems, 45 per cent of households were cultivating smaller areas. Seventy per cent reported a decrease in the range of crops grown. More than half said they lacked labour.

Labour and capital shortages

Due to labour and capital shortages, families withdraw into subsistence food production. Overall production of cash crops drops. Smallholders grow Uganda's main export, labour-intensive coffee. Forty per cent of coffee plants are over 50 years old and need to be replaced. To boost coffee production, more labour is required. But the coffee-growing areas near Lake Victoria have the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence, and fewer adults.

In some areas of northern Uganda, millet and sorghum are left overgrown because labour is diverted to caring for the sick. Among pastoralists in the east, many adults die before they can hand down traditional skills in herd care.

Minister of Agriculture Israel Kibirige Sebunya paints a different picture: "At one time, we feared AIDS might have a dramatic impact on agriculture, but it did not happen." The minister refers to Uganda's impressive boost in agricultural production, thanks to privatization, better marketing, new cash crops and active farmers' associations.

The minister, however, is looking at the big picture. At the micro level, where Ms. Nansubuga and others like her go hungry, it is another story. "Our agricultural boom does not translate into better food security for rural households," says Ms. Stella Neema, a researcher with the Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in Kampala. Data from 1995 show that 38 per cent of Ugandan children are stunted. Forty per cent of under-fours have chronic malnutrition.

Mr. Gary Howe, director for Africa at the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), says AIDS has brought "a divergence in opportunities: a large sector of the population has no access to the new crops and markets, coupled with an acute crisis of labour and tremendous dependence of households on single women and the elderly."

However, Mr. Howe says agricultural productivity can be increased through better crop management and plant varieties with higher productivity and weed and pest resistance, but less demand for labour. One example is a new strain of cassava, recently introduced in the country, which is resistant to mould disease.

Still, Uganda's farming systems are not the most vulnerable to the AIDS pandemic in Africa. Uganda has fertile soil, a tropical climate, abundant rains, plenty of land, and a staple diet based on drought-resistant and low-labour cassava, sweet potato, millet and green bananas. But in the rain-fed, maize-based cropping systems of West and Southern Africa, AIDS spells a disaster. If terminal sickness and burial coincide with certain tasks, like weeding and harvesting, the crop is compromised.

Experts in smallholder agriculture stress that farmers need farming techniques that require less labour, such as zero tillage, and less expensive inputs, including natural pest control.

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