AGRICULTURE & AGRIBUSINESS IN UGANDA
The Agricultural Sector continues to be the most important sector in Uganda; it employs approximately 69% of the population and contributed about 26% to the GDP. The Government has increased the allocation to the agricultural sector budget to 65% increase.
The main agricultural crops include grains, sugarcane, cotton, tea and Coffee which accounts for 20% of total export earnings and a third of foreign exchange earnings. Under the National Development Plan 2, there is an emphasis on the importance of agro processing and Value addition of Uganda’s traditional cash crops mainly in cotton ginning, tea processing, coffee hauling, tobacco handling.
Agro processing and Value addition in agricultural production can take different forms and levels ranging from the basic to more sophisticated level e.g. packaging, processing, cooling, drying, extracting or any other type of processes that differentiates the product from the original raw commodity. Investment opportunities in agriculture and agro-processing are vast, ranging from cut flower production for exports, oil seed production and processing, cotton production, ginning, spinning and weaving, the production and processing of livestock products.
Opportunities for investment exist in:
- Commercial farming in both crops and animal industries, as well as aquaculture;
- Value addition (Agro-industries -Agro-food industries;
- Manufacturing of inputs (fertilizers, pesticides etc);
- Cold storage facilities and logistics;
- Farm Machinery manufacturing and assembly;
- Packaging;
- Irrigation Schemes.
Other opportunities include wheat products and the fast growing milk production and processing sector, fruit processing, fruit drying, grain milling, meat processing, leather tanning and fish processing. Uganda is among the leading producers of coffee, bananas and oil seed crops (sesame (simsim), soybean, sunflower, etc). It is also a major producer of other crops like tea, cotton organic cotton, tobacco, cereals, fresh fruit & vegetables and nuts, essential oils, flowers, poultry, fresh water fish.
The country has been zoned Agricultural land for Sale into specific production areas and in order to ease logistics and supply of Agricultural products / source of raw materials, all these areas are well linked to a good national road grid network.
