Strategy for agricultural marketing and agro-processing ... - Foodnet

2. BACKGROUND
The medium- to long-term development goal of Uganda is to reduce absolute poverty to less than
10 per cent by 2017. The Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) is Government’s main
planning framework, establishing the principles to guide investment plans and manage the
economy in order to achieve its development goal. Poverty eradication is to be attained through
successful implementation of all four of the PEAP’s “pillars”. These are:
Pillar 1 Creating a framework for rapid economic growth and structural transformation
Pillar 2 Ensuring good governance and security;
Pillar 3 Directly increasing the ability of the people to raise their incomes; and
Pillar 4 Directly increasing the quality of life of the poor.
In order to implement the PEAP, various strategies have been designed, or will be designed to
operationalise these pillars.
The Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture was prepared to contribute fundamentally to Pillar 3
of the PEAP. It is a Government framework for the eradication of poverty through the
transformation of agriculture and agro-based rural enterprises - from subsistence to commercial
production. The objectives of PMA are, in particular:
Increasing agricultural sector incomes;
Improving household food security through the market;
Creating gainful employment through secondary processing and services; and
Promoting the sustainable use and management of natural resources.
In the PMA implementation process, there are seven priority areas for public action, namely:
Improving the access to and quality of, agricultural advisory services;
Promoting agricultural research and technology development;
Promoting agro-processing and improving access to markets;
Increasing access to and availability of, rural finance;
Promoting agricultural skills and knowledge through formal and informal education;
Promoting the sustainable use and management of natural resources; and
Improving supportive physical infrastructure.
It is the third of these that provides the focus for this Strategy.
The PMA contains vision and mission statements for improving market access. The vision
statement is: “increased and sustainable supply of and demand for competitive processed and
non-processed agro-products on domestic, regional and international markets”. The mission
statement is: “to implement measures that facilitate increased supply of requisite inputs in order
to ensure increased and sustained supply of competitive processed and unprocessed Uganda
agricultural products in domestic, regional and international markets consistent with the
economic growth objectives of the country”.
This Marketing and Agro-Processing Strategy (MAPS) has been designed to contribute to both
this vision and mission. The PMA recognises that improved market access is a key condition for
the transformation of the sector from subsistence to commercial production. The main objective
of the Strategy is therefore to promote market access for farmers. It defines the priority areas for
action and the ways in which its associated programme of interventions should be
operationalised.
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