Abstract:

Coffee is the main cash crop in the Ugandan economy contributing to over 50% of GDP, about 65% of the
total export earnings and 80% of household employment. A predominately smallholder practice, coffee
farming is done mainly by resource-poor farmers on holdings of 2 hectares of land or less. The perenniality
of the crop dictates an intergenerational hold on land, which poses land ownership, inheritance, labour and
gender complexities with serious consequences on land and environment degradation and, ultimately on
incomes, welfare and survival of the coffee-farming households. It is now widely recognized that the
smallholder practices have resulted in land degradation. Nutrient losses to the agricultural system are not
being sufficiently replaced, which has subsequently had a serious impact on crop productivity. A trade
account of gains and losses of nutrients in the export of the produce at national level is constructed and the
sheer scale of resource loss put simply as the “invisible cost" is alarming. And yet evidence now available
links soil degradation and poor farming practices to higher susceptibility of coffee to Coffee Wilt Disease
(CWD) attack, for instance. Whereas liberalization in 1991 has revamped the sub-sector, it has not nonetheless
come without any cones. A “too much opened up" case to critics, it has been distorted, misunderstood and
out rightly exploited. With the depressed world market prices currently, pressure has mounted for Uganda
to produce for gourmet and specialty market niches. This spells not entirely new challenges but, no doubt,
bigger problems for an already over-stretched and more often overwhelmed regulatory system in place