{UAH} Kabaka wants cooperative unions revived to fight poverty

Folks;

Nostalgia is a good escape from reality.

True, the cooperative movement was once synonymous with two major cash crops in Uganda; coffee, (a perennial crop) and cotton, which is an annual crop. And Unions made great contributions to the economic well-being of our farmers until about 30 years ago.

But times have changed. Today, neither coffee nor cotton, needs a Cooperative Union to reach the market, because there are better and more cost-efficient ways to get there. 

The ease with which a coffee farmer in, say, Masaka can directly connect to a buyer in New York, eliminates the need for him to join a cooperative union. Cooperative Unions, were and remain essentially middle man, or a distribution network. 

Moreover, Unions cut into the farmer's revenue by levying a host of fees: membership, transportation, storage, etc. So, coffee farmers are doing just fine.

Cotton, on the other hand, has lost its lure, due to host of reasons: 

1) Ever-increasing population has reduced arable land for cultivation, 2) being an annual crop ( because it's planted annually), cotton has always been vulnerable to adverse climatic changes, and 3) available land to grow cotton is increasingly less fertile.

To top it off, demand for raw cotton is also at an all time low, because factories that used to produce cotton products - clothes, bedding, etc. - are either idle or extinct.

I think His Majesty the Kabaka genuinely wants our farmers to be better organized. But I don't think his motive is to help them to streamline the marketing of their produce. Rather, methinks, the Kabaka wants farmers to have VOICE. What that  VOICE may say is anyone's guess.

Pojim

Kabaka wants cooperative unions revived to fight poverty

Kabaka wants cooperative unions revived to fight poverty The king said cooperatives employ many people pointing back to the 1960s when members were able open their own b...