Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile: The challenges which will face
agriculture in an oil economy
Speech by Mr Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile, Governor of the Bank of Uganda, at the CEO
Summit Forum, Kampala, 30 October 2012.
* * *
1. Introduction
For a country with fertile land and abundant rainfall which give it a strong comparative
advantage in agriculture, Uganda's agriculture performance is weak. Agricultural productivity
per worker, at approximately $200 per year, is among the lowest in the world. Real growth in
agriculture has averaged only two percent per annum over the last 10 years, less than a third
of the average growth of the rest of the Ugandan economy. Productivity is especially low in
the food crop sub-sector, which is dominated by smallholder farmers, because farmers use
rudimentary farm technology and produce mainly for subsistence rather than the market.
The production of oil on a commercial scale will intensify the problems facing the agricultural
sector. The spending of the revenues from oil in the domestic economy will inevitably bring
about some appreciation of the real exchange rate. As a result food imports will become
cheaper in real terms and agricultural exports such as coffee, tea and cotton will lose
competitiveness. Higher wages paid in the non-traded goods industries such as services will
pull labour out of agriculture. All of these effects have been observed in many oil producing
countries around the world, including those in Africa such as Gabon and Nigeria; they are
features of the phenomenon known as Dutch disease. Unless there are radical changes in
our approach to agriculture, our agricultural performance will weaken further, with very
deleterious consequences for rural poverty, employment, inequality, geographically balanced
growth and food security.
The theme of my talk this afternoon is that it is imperative to implement a comprehensive
strategy to support smallholder agriculture if we are to avert a long term decline in the
agricultural sector; a decline which will be accelerated by the exploitation of our oil resources.
If we can help the broad mass of farmers in this country to become more productive, raise
their yields and sell more of their output on the market, it will be possible to create a more
dynamic agricultural sector which is strong enough to survive despite the adverse impacts of
oil on the real exchange rate. Furthermore, by supporting Uganda's farmers to increase their
marketable output, we can boost agro-processing industries and thus promote
industrialisation. Strengthening agriculture will not be possible without devoting more public
resources to support the sector, but how we spend public resources is critical, as I will
explain later in this talk.
2. What should be our strategy for agriculture?
The goal of agricultural strategy should be to support the modernisation of agriculture.
Modernisation entails farmers adopting good agricultural practises, employing productivity
enhancing farm inputs, making decisions about input use and choice of crops or livestock to
maximise their profit and selling more of their output on the market. It will bring about a
switch towards the production of higher value crops, as well as raising yields per acre and
yields per worker.
A feasible strategy for agricultural development in Uganda must have at its centre support for
smallholder farmers. Smallholders comprise 96 percent of Uganda's farmers. It is unrealistic
to expect that Uganda's agricultural performance can be turned around by ignoring
smallholders and focussing instead on large farms. Furthermore, small farms generate
higher value added per acre than medium sized farms which in turn are more productive than
large farms. Although large farms market a higher share of their output than small farms, the
former are not very efficient.
On average, crop income per acre is four times higher on small farms than on large farms in
Uganda.1 With constraints on land availability tightening in Uganda, it is imperative to
implement a strategy which makes more productive use of land, and this is most feasible by
strengthening smallholder farming.
Smallholders in Uganda face a raft of constraints to commercialisation, including poor access
to markets and lack of commercial and technical information, but with adequate support from
Government policies to alleviate these constraints it should be possible to generate
substantial improvements in productivity, output and incomes; improvements which will help
to insulate agriculture from the negative impact of oil. How Government can best support
agriculture is the question I turn to next.
3. Policy measures to support agricultural modernisation
Research carried out by Lawrence Bategeka and John Matovu of the EPRC, using a
computable general equilibrium model of the Ugandan economy, examined how agriculture
would be affected by the spending of oil resources. In their baseline scenario, under which oil
revenues are simply used to fund an expansion of Government, the real appreciation of the
exchange rate leads to a significant reduction in agricultural production, especially production
of the traditional agricultural exports. However, Bategeka and Matovu find that, if additional
budgetary resources are targeted at the agricultural sector, in ways which improve
agricultural productivity, the negative impact of oil on agriculture can be mitigated, enabling
the sector to avoid a decline in output. Moreover, they also find that investments which raise
productivity in agriculture also boost manufacturing growth, because agriculture is an
important source of intermediate inputs for manufacturing.2 Uganda currently only allocates
about 3.5 percent of the Government budget directly to agriculture. Raising budgetary
allocations to agriculture and for investment in rural areas should be a strategic priority.
Whether or not public spending on agriculture actually contributes to improving agricultural
productivity depends on the nature of the spending. There is strong empirical evidence from
around the world to indicate that the provision of public goods and services, which are
defined as goods and services which because of their character cannot be supplied optimally
by the market, have a large positive impact on agriculture with potentially very high social
rates of return, if well designed and implemented.3 Examples of the type of public goods and
services which are relevant for agricultural development in Uganda include:
i) Agricultural research and development, to produce improved farm technologies such
as high yield seeds and to determine the optimal farm technologies for the
conditions prevailing in Uganda;
ii) Agricultural extension services to provide information and technical advice to
farmers to adopt good agricultural practises and to use appropriate purchased
inputs; this can help farmers raise their yields;
iii) The construction and especially the maintenance of rural feeder roads to reduce the
cost of transporting agricultural produce to markets and raise farm gate prices; in
terms of encouraging farmers to produce more output for their market, investment in
rural feeder roads is more important than investment in main roads;
iv) The provision of veterinary services and the control of plant diseases; controlling
animal and plant disease is an activity with very large positive externalities;
v) The provision of market information, for example price information, to help farmers
make more informed decisions about which crops to grow and to strengthen their
ability to negotiate prices with traders.
vi) Clarifying and strengthening land rights and the security of land tenure, to improve
incentives for farmers to invest in land improvements, encourage land rentals and
enable farmers to use their land as collateral for credit;
In contrast to the provision of public goods and services, the subsidised provision by
Government of private goods, such as fertiliser and credit, has a much weaker impact on
agricultural productivity. Such subsidies often simply transfer resources from taxpayers to
favoured beneficiaries and encourage the inefficient use of subsidised inputs. When the
opportunity cost of subsidising private goods from the Government budget is taken into
account - the fact that the money spent on these subsidies could have been used more
productively on public goods and services - the overall impact on agricultural productivity is
negative. This means that the focus of agricultural extension services should be the provision
of technical advice to farmers, rather than the sale of subsidised farm inputs. These cardinal
principles which should inform the formulation of our agricultural strategy - to invest in public
goods and services and avoid subsidising the provision of private goods - are of particular
relevance for agricultural finance, a subject to which I will now turn.
4. Agricultural finance
Agricultural finance generates controversy in many developing countries, including Uganda.
There is often an assumption that agriculture faces inherent difficulties in mobilising credit
and that this is a binding constraint on expanding agricultural output which justifies
government intervention to provide or subsidise finance. There is no doubt that providing
credit to small farmers involves very large transactions costs and high risks for financial
institutions, which means that most small farmers are excluded from formal credit markets.
Formal financial markets are subject to failures when serving small farmers which, in
principle, provide grounds for Government intervention to promote financial inclusion.
But market failures are much less pertinent for larger farmers and agro-processors who are
able to access formal credit markets if they are creditworthy and have viable business
enterprises. There are many profitable agro-processors and other high value agricultural
producers in Uganda who are able to meet their requirements for financial services from the
domestic financial sector, including the regional development banks which operate in
Uganda, because these enterprises are well managed with a good track record. Market
failures are much less in evidence in this segment of the financial market and hence calls for
direct Government support are more difficult to justify. Government should avoid investing
directly in production facilities, such as agro-processing facilities, or providing finance to
private investors for this purpose. Decisions about investment in agro-processing are best
left to the private sector, to be taken purely on commercial criteria, without being distorted by
the provision of cheap credit or other forms of finance from the Government. Government
induced distortions in financial markets will lead to the misallocation of resources, reducing
the social rate of return to these resources.
Modernising smallholder farming will entail smallholders making greater use of purchased
farm inputs. Hence modernisation will require smallholders having better access to finance.
Nevertheless finance is unlikely to be the binding constraint on modernisation of smallholder
agriculture and unless more important constraints are tackled, enhancing smallholders'
access to finance will be ineffective. Policy measures to strengthen the provision of financial
services in the rural areas must be part of a much broader set of interventions to support
smallholders to adopt modern farm technology and produce for the market, of the type I have
already mentioned. Unless smallholders have adopted good agricultural practises, such as
the use of improved seeds, proper field preparation, timely planting, weeding and pest
control, proper harvest and post-harvest handling, etc - practises which can improve yields
significantly - they will not be able to utilise credit effectively because their farms will not be
profitable.
How should Government support the development of rural financial markets? The key
interventions required are to alleviate the market failures which impede the delivery of
financial services to farmers. For example, it is necessary to strengthen the institutional
environment for loan security to reduce the credit risks of lending to farmers. Strengthening
land rights to allow farmers to use land as loan collateral would help to make farmers more
creditworthy. The proposed establishment of a Collateral Securities Registry and the
enactment of the Chattel Securities Bill, which is currently before Parliament, will help to
widen the range of assets which are acceptable to lenders as collateral. Promoting the
warehouse receipt system set up by the Uganda Commodity Exchange would also be a
useful measure to support lending to agriculture.
Microfinance institutions (MFIs) and savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOs) are much
better suited institutionally than commercial banks to serving small farmers, but they are
often constrained by managerial and technical weaknesses. Hence there is an important role
for Government to assist MFIs and SACCOs to strengthen their management and the
professional skills of their officers. The Bank of Uganda is encouraging the larger tier 4 MFIs
to upgrade to become licensed deposit taking MDIs. Assisting MFIs and SACCOs to
strengthen their technical and managerial capacities so that they can mobilise funds from the
communities that they serve and intermediate these funds to creditworthy farmers is a much
more sustainable and effective approach to developing rural finance than providing them with
funds from the budget for on-lending.
5. Conclusions
I want to end this talk by highlighting what I believe are the four key messages.
First, agriculture in Uganda risks being severely damaged when oil production comes on
stream unless comprehensive measures are taken to modernise the sector, by raising
productivity and promoting commercialisation.
Secondly, the focus of agricultural strategy must be smallholder farmers, who comprise the
vast majority of farmers in Uganda, rather than large farms.
Thirdly, Government should allocate a much larger share of the budget to agriculture and
investment in rural infrastructure, but this spending should be allocated to public goods and
services, not the subsidised provision of private goods.
Fourthly, rural finance can contribute to agricultural modernisation in Uganda, but only if it is
accompanied by effective measures to encourage farmers to adopt good agricultural
practises, improve access to markets, improve control of animal and plant diseases and
strengthen land rights.