Projections from the United Nations indicate that Uganda will have 94 million mouths to feed in 2050.

For a country that has been fruitlessly grappling with meeting the requisite caloric intake of its 34-million-strong population, this grotesque increase will undoubtedly attract a bad countenance. The countenance has in many ways always been a revolting one thanks in no small measure to the overt signs of a food deficit. Only last year, on my trek back to Kampala after a sojourn at my ancestral home in Sironko, I couldn’t help but notice how grocery shops were few and far between on the seemingly endless Tirinyi road.

A few years ago, this road used to buzz with a glut of activities that revolved around selling staple foods. Nowadays, it cuts a rather ghostly impression with its yawning stretches punctuated with mirages. Occasionally, you get to see a grocer with a pitiful turnout that has been indented by the unrelenting sun. The sight, as you would expect, is not soothing. It will get grimmer, experts warn, when the ravages of climate change continue to manifest in the forthcoming years.

Evidently, something terribly wrong has happened to the Ugandan food system. The indentures are there for all to see. The statistician can find the hallmarks of a food crisis posited in the dour food inflation figures as they survey the latest food index. The high-end folks can decipher the crisis when they visit the countryside that has long morphed from a breadbasket into a food insecurity hotspot.

The low-end, meanwhile, discern the impact of the food crisis in the jarring number of famine-related deaths. Government’s reaction to the food crisis has been rather familiarly slapdash. It has promised to overhaul the cumbersome food system by building silos as well as drumming up the aspect of locals using granaries. Observers say, and rightly so, that government is being superficial.

They expect it to take a lead role in combating climate change. They, for instance, don’t want government to oversee the devastation of ecosystems as has been the case. They reason that the ‘I’ll Be Gone’ mantra (self-centeredness from our baby boomer leaders, if you will) that government has used to quash the concept of sustainable development will reap the whirlwind. Aside from that, they also expect government to rein in the huge land purchases by the rich who have over the years shunned agriculture anyway.

Add to those the wish that government be more gender sensitive to women who are more irrefutably predisposed to agriculture and you can clearly see just how long the to-do list is. Indeed, going into the next 50 years of self-rule, a lot will be expected of government as it attempts to ensure a subliminal fairness and transparency in food markets. Government will be expected to be more proactive in its pursuit to guarantee food security.

Ultimately, the powers that be will be expected to invest more in agricultural endeavours (fertilizers, new breed of high-yield crops, and cultivation methods) and research (into the banana wilt, for instance) to put paid the perennial food shortages that have impelled many locals to dot countryside highways like Tirinyi with empty food baskets. It won’t be easy to turn Africa, let alone Uganda, into an American corn belt or a Brazilian cerrado principally because, during the next 50 years of self-rule, we will be in the throes of an oil peak.

With oil having peaked and summarily gone into terminal decline, the Green Revolution that the world will be desperately hoping to feed its nine-billion-strong population in 2050 risks never seeing the light of day. The high-yielding crop varieties, hybridized seeds, expansive irrigation schemes and synthetic fertilizers that are the very embodiment of the Green Revolution are profoundly dependent on oil.

This makes it susceptible to hitting the skids as oil shock could, for one, mean that there will be no vast amounts of energy to produce, say, a nitrogen fertilizer. The discovery of 3.5 billion barrels of proved oil reserves in the Lake Albert Basin undoubtedly puts Uganda in a position of relative comfort going into the next 50 years of self-rule. Superficially, you could argue that Uganda will be having the oil to prop a Green Revolution that will portend well for its growing population.

The Green Revolution would give Uganda’s agriculture sector (which has like a snail been creeping at 1.4 per cent) a shot in the arm by ensuring that the country’s arable land is put to good use. But it can also paradoxically make Uganda more food-insecure by spawning the twin evils of genetic pollution and genetic erosion. It can also pose a threat to the biodiversity of wildlife and agriculture, two sectors that if properly managed stand at the threshold of taking Uganda places in the next 50 years of self-rule.

The biodiversity drawbacks notwithstanding, Uganda will increasingly find itself predisposed to the Green Revolution in the next 50 years as it attempts to paper over the cracks on its food system in light of the population growth. But somewhere along the 50-year trail, Uganda will also reach its own oil peak. When it does, the scarcity of fossil fuel will drive its growing population into using biofuels.

Since biofuels are derived from the biological carbon cycle, a food versus fuels jostle will take centre-stage (people will use their crops to produce fuel as opposed to ingestion). This will only exacerbate the country’s food security while also decimating the biodiversity. Imports will be no option as other countries will also be grappling with a food deficit. If imports do trickle in, they will no doubt cost a princely sum.

Therefore, as we take baby steps into the second 50 years of self-rule, addressing the issue of food security should be of the essence. The future of food could not have been more at-risk!

rmadoi@observer.ug