Abstract:

Uganda's long history of cotton production and trading has gone through many phases and has attempted many "solutions" to the problem of encouraging peasant farmers to grow more cotton. Over the span of more than half a century, everything from ox-ploughing campaigns, early planting schemes, fertiliser promotion programmes, block farming systems, subsidised tractor hire units, formal sector planning, insecticide spraying projects, rural credit operations to investment in agricultural extension has been tried, usually with ambiguous and occasionally negative results. In many respects, Uganda has been a test-bed for every innovative idea in peasant farming since the beginning of the present century. This study has not had the temerity to propose yet more bold new ideas to help revitalise Uganda's cotton sector; instead two simple old ideas are advocated with great emphasis. Pay an adequate price for seed cotton, which farmers find rewarding, and to which they will respond most positively; restore cotton research to maintain lint quality so that the international market will have full confidence once again in Ugandan cotton.