Global Food Crisis and President Museveni's Populist View

ELIAS BIRYABAREMA


KAMPALA--Just about every body round here and across the globe agrees the escalating food prices are fomenting a new world pandemic, that will unsettle societies and spawn desperation and death.

As it appears, the logic is pretty simple: costly food will increasingly slip out of the reach of millions of poor folks already struggling to survive daily. Mass starvation will consume millions. And as the civil unrest erupting in several countries has demonstrated, the consequences of this spreading hunger can be far reaching.

Only one man is smiling through all this global food melancholy—President Yoweri Museveni.

Always a contrarian, his supposedly unfailing wisdom ahead of everybody’s, Mr Museveni was reported on NTV’s Tonight news programme recently claiming that far from being saddened, he was revelling in the runaway food prices. For once, he said, his peasants, long tormented by bottom earnings from their produce, were going to get rich.

Glibly, his political assistant, Mr Moses Byaruhanga chorused the same assertion. It is hard to understand why Mr Museveni should be making such an embarrassingly populist claim.

True, Uganda produces a number of foods—beef, rice, sugar, corn (maize) etc— whose world supplies are running critically low and it is easy to construct a simplistic argument that the rise in the prices of these foods is good for Uganda.

But that would be farcical.

Although accurate figures are hard to find, Uganda is believed to be a net food importer and any steep upswing in the cost of food will easily deteriorate our trade deficit, and potentially rattle the larger economy. Uganda’s agriculture is nearly all of it subsistence, and there’s little the country’s peasants—barely able to feed themselves even in the best of times, to say nothing of exporting—can benefit from the soaring world food prices.


Yes, a peasant here and there, with extended acreage under cultivation, will rake in a few extra shillings but that’s a blip compared to the deadly hunger that could grip urbanites and the mass starvation awaiting the millions in North and Eastern Uganda that rely on relief food daily if the rocketing prices are not curbed.

In fact, even if these prices go on to engender a crisis in Kampala and other urban centres, a large section of the peasant families, who daily scrimp by on remittances from their richer, urban-dwelling relatives, will get sucked up in the pandemic as those relatives spend all they earn on the costly food. A great deal of the food consumed across Uganda is imported: wheat, corn, rice, cooking oil etc. I can’t seem to see any obvious winners in this food price scourge—it’s all a lose-lose situation.

In fact, more than any other leader, President Museveni should worry: 1.6million of his citizens, trapped in displacement camps in North and North East Uganda, are fed by WFP, mostly on imported food—corn, cooking oil, wheat flour etc. As the prices rise, WFP’s budget will only be able to purchase lesser and lesser food and the rations are already being cut as the body’s donors are unwilling or slow in responding to appeals for more generosity. And even if WFP were purchasing the food from Uganda, the supply scarcities would still spark immense suffering despite a windfall for the middlemen and may be some peasants. Diluted by the price hikes, the WFP’s budget would only cover a fraction of its normal food purchase levels, meaning hunger in the bellies of millions in Uganda whose mouths it caters.

And that’s before we even start to think of the dreadful consequences of starvation in Kampala and other municipalities across the country. Already unable to cope with the ever increasing hordes of poor, sudden starvation would stir nothing short of upheaval, a crisis the NRM can hardly handle. Gloomily, too, the NRM, never a government to plan for contingencies, runs the nation without strategic food reserves and so all it takes is a mere slight jolt to a normal food flow to plunge Uganda into a full-blown catastrophe. The ballooning food supply crisis could offer that jolt.

If Mr Museveni were right and food prices were good for peasant nations, West African countries, which like us have plenty of them, would not be erupting. And yet governments there have had to mass police forces on the streets to quell hunger-stoked explosions of violence.

So how, then, minding all the foregoing could Museveni start celebrating the global food price surge?

It’s a noxious blend of populist politics, mendacity and plain incompetence that have come to define the NRM lately. His predictions of bonanzas for peasants, false and absurd as they are, are easily believed by the NRM’s core constituency—the naïve rural masses. And obviously unprepared to absorb the impact a food crisis, the populist declarations of the supposed bonanza helps Mr Museveni sooth a fretful and agitated populace.