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Beyond Kony: Agriculture Flourishes In Northern Uganda After Rebels Exit

Beyond Kony: Agriculture Flourishes In Northern Uganda After Rebels Exit

Agriculture in Northern Uganda was unthinkable for a long time as rebel forces, led by Joseph Kony, wreaked havoc on villages, killing men, capturing women and turning kids into child soldiers.

This is now a thing of the past, according to a Reuters report. The region, which witnessed more than its fair share of violence in the late ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, is now a scene of lush corn, rice and sesame farms among commercial forests funded by foreign agribusiness investors.

Rain-fed farming in Northern Uganda still has its share of challenges including lack of proper road networks for farmers to deliver their produce to market. But it is far better now for the millions of people living there.

 

The region that borders wartorn Southern Sudan has the potential to feed the entire Horn of Africa. But its legacy is one of conflict, pitting the government against warlord Kony’s Lord Resistance Army (LRA).

“Northern Uganda has the potential to become the breadbasket for not only Uganda but even for East Africa,” said Martin Maugustini, country manager for Afri Uganda, a unit of South African agribusiness giant Afgri Limited, in a Reuters interview.

For years the LRA roamed the land, pushing people out of their farms and into government-protected camps. Many of these people chose to stay in the camps after the war ended some 10 years ago, leaving large tracts of virgin, fertile land open for large-scale agribusiness investors.

Maugustini’s Afri Uganda has invested about $10 million in the last three years in maize farming in Gulu. Another company, Amatheon, has spent $15 million cultivating corn, sorghum and sunflower on a 1,700 hectare piece of land in Nwoya, Reuters reported.

But these investments have built resentment among the locals who feel the investors are there to grab their ancestral land. This has affected some agribusiness investors.