Despite Ravages of War, Uganda Avoids Famine : ‘Because We Have Food, We Don’t Realize How Bad Off We Are,’ Official Says

It was dinner time. A teen-age soldier, an AK-47 strapped awkwardly over his shoulder, hungrily eyed some mangoes hanging from a tree above his guard post. Suddenly, he picked up a stick, tossed it at the tree, and whacked loose a mango. Dinner was served.

The mango, eaten last week near the rear entrance of the heavily guarded Speke Hotel in downtown Kampala, is an apt symbol of how Uganda has been able to feed itself even as two generations of hungry young men with AK-47s have ripped much of this verdant East African nation apart. Most of the public works--roads, schools, hospitals, water systems--that in the 1960s made Uganda one of Africa’s most livable and prosperous countries have been wrecked by more than 15 years of violence.

In the current civil war, forces of Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army seized and sealed off access to the southwestern third of the country, then cinched their victory by marching into Kampala, the capital. That early rebel territory is the richest, most fertile part of Uganda. But, like the soldier with the stick, the rest of the country has had little trouble finding food.

Anywhere Else, Starvation

“If this violence had happened in Tanzania or Kenya or just about any other place in Africa, there would have been mass starvation,” said David Mulira, acting director of the East African Development Bank. “Because we have food, we don’t realize how bad off we are.”

Kampala’s city market is a paradigm of plenty amid the accumulated ruins of civil war. On a hill above the market, tall grass and garbage occupy the remains of shops demolished by the artillery of the Tanzanian invasion forces that in 1979 forced Idi Amin into exile.

On surrounding hills, all perpetually green and lush in the highland sun, there are a half-dozen or so abandoned construction sites. A huge, modern construction crane has stood idle for nearly a decade above the proposed site of Uganda’s social security building. The site is a large hole in the center of Kampala, slowly filling with trash.

Blackened, boarded-up shops--victims of the coup that deposed President Milton Obote last July--border the market. Army soldiers, after toppling Obote’s government, looted most of Kampala. They were celebrating, Uganda-style, the fruits of power.

Abundance in Market

But inside the city market in recent days, stalls were bursting with an abundance and variety of food that exists in few African capitals: Passion fruit, eggplant, dates, beef steak, ground nuts, oranges, papaws, lemons, yams, pork, pineapples, dried grasshoppers, and scores of other fruit, vegetables and meats.

There were hundreds of bunches of green matoke (a kind of banana), the staple of the Uganda diet. The market was perfumed with curry powder and cinnamon and the aroma of smoked Nile perch. The giant fish are caught in nearby Lake Victoria, which can be seen from the hills of Kampala.

The Uganda Commercial Bank, in a recent report on agriculture, said that “rich soils and a mild equatorial climate have continued to make Uganda a place where virtually anything can grow luxuriantly. . . . Uganda remains one of the few African states that are self-sufficient in food.”

It rains nearly every month here, and in one year farmers can often harvest three crops from the same field.

The country has almost no storage for grain or vegetables. But agricultural specialists say this is not a problem. There is always more food ripening in the fields.

Successions of Rulers

Perhaps the best measure of Uganda’s fertility is that it has survived. As Amin’s squads were busy killing Acholi tribesmen in the mid-1970s, and as Obote’s army was killing Baganda men, women and children in the Luwero Triangle north of Kampala in the early 1980s, the government here all but ignored agriculture. The infrastructure that supported Uganda’s farm-based economy fell to pieces.

In the late 1960s, modern water-supply facilities served about 70% of the rural population, and almost everyone living in towns and cities, according to the World Bank. Now, the bank says only 7% of the people in rural areas and 40% of those in and near cities have safe drinking water. Visitors to Kampala, according to a publication called “What’s Around in Uganda,” are advised to “take only boiled water.”

There is an array of such before-and-after statistics. In a country that once boasted the best teaching hospital and medical care in East Africa, spending on health care is estimated at $1.70 per person a year, the lowest in East and Central Africa. In a country whose construction industry once was an African model, less than 1% of the gross national product is spent on building, the lowest portion in East Africa.

In the last month or so, the people of Uganda briefly had reason to believe that the tribally inspired, state-led violence that has crippled their country might finally be coming to an end. A peace agreement, signed in Nairobi on Dec. 17, was supposed to create a coalition government in which the generals who seized power in July would share power with Museveni’s rebels in the south.

Accord Was Never Applied

But Museveni refused to implement the peace agreement, even to come to Kampala, for fear of violence against his men by the nation’s notoriously undisciplined army. The violence went on, sometimes reaching new lows in looting and rape.

Despite all this, Uganda not only fed itself in 1985, but it exported food--as it has every year since its independence in 1962. If the fighting finally stops and a stable government consolidates power, economists and development specialists here say that Uganda has a greater potential for economic recovery than any nation on the continent except South Africa. They agree that the same resources--good land and lots of rain--that have kept Ugandans from hunger during the years of violence could make the country boom after a few years of peace.

“Within five to 10 years, this country could be back to what it was in the 1960s, a solidly based, rural economy without any of the food constraints of other African countries,” said Christopher Logan, a British-paid economist who advises Uganda’s Finance Ministry.

Logan estimated that it would take about five years for earnings from exports of coffee, tea, corn, fish and cobalt to pay off the country’s foreign debt. Service on that debt now eats up about 70% of export earnings, Logan said.

Coffee Riches

But if real peace should become a reality and the rebel-held southwest is opened up, Logan says recent sharp increases in the price of coffee (which accounts for 93% of export earnings) could cut the debt burden this year to an onerous but manageable 35% of earnings.

To supplement its own resources, there are tens of millions of dollars of foreign aid pledged to Uganda. The U.N. Development Program has committed more than $50 million for the next four years. The World Bank plans to spend $70 million to $100 million a year. The United States has appropriated $8 million. All the money, however, is on hold, waiting for Uganda to become safe enough for aid officials.