Our rising food costs

A friend of mine asked me about the ‘growing food crisis’ - ie riots in Haiti, food prices going up - and am I seeing anything on the ground here in Kampala.

It’s a good question and we are definitely seeing the effects. In fact it was at the news meeting last Wednesday that I realized how fast food prices here were rocketing. Firstly many of the men were complaining that the price of meat had jumped sh 1,500 (nearly 50 per cent), and bread has gone up also. It hadn’t really effected me directly, but then the place were I have been buying milk a litre went from sh 700 to sh 1,000 ($0.41 to $0.52 CAN) Not a big deal to me, but a really big deal to many of the local people that now can only afford half-a-litre.

And Uganda is not supporting itself with a lot of products. Sure we have local produce vendors, butchers, and dairy stalls, but on a grander scale, Uganda is as depended on what is going on in the world as most of the other developing nations. And for sure when the problems get worse, then it’s the developing world that will bare the brunt of it.

The World Trade Organization tends to favour the developed world and many countries have trade embargos slapped on them if the government so much as attempts to help the agriculture off the ground. Not like Canada, where a quota system is applied to the dairy and poultry industry without punishment. It’s also why the BC softwood lumber thing goes on and on. The WTO can’t do much without the USA permission. That means the farmers here can’t ever grow enough for their own country let alone enough to looking after East Africa.

Now I realize I just made a very complex issue far too simple, but that’s the bare bones.