Uganda: Nagenda Tobacco is Disastrous to West Nile

Source from:  New Vision (Kampala) 10 July 2007 07/13/2007

Either by luck or sheer lack of it, I got on John Nagenda 's famous column on June 16. Nagenda wishes to portray me as some anti-tobacco campaigner who was in West Nile to spoil his business, and calls Vice-President Prof. Gilbert Bukenya Mr. Mountain Rice. I would appreciate it very much if Nagenda pointed out my inaccuracies in that article. However, I will correct the ones he deliberately created to protect his job on the board of BAT. I wrote the article not as the Press Secretary to the Vice President, but as a journalist. I will do it again and provide pictures of families in grass-thatched homes that have been growing tobacco for the last 10 years making the sh50b Nagenda is talking about and destroying vast areas of trees in search of woodfuel. I will show you empty beehives in the bushes here, because their natural vegetation has been eaten away by a desperate community struggling to survive. In Uganda, we have a new variety of rice - Upland rice. Upland, because it can grow anywhere as opposed to the swampy or paddy fields we are used to. It grows in three months, is a cheap food source, cost-effective and environment-friendly. Bukenya did not go to West Nile to de-campaign tobacco growing. His view was that tobacco must be left for the people with larger pieces of land and not the poor people with five acres of land or less who have nothing to eat and have to wait nine months before they can earn an income. If tobacco brings in an annual sh50b a year, what has BAT done for people in West Nile to make it proud? Tobacco does make money, but it is companies like BAT and those active in that region that have been exploiting these poor people, giving them the wrong information to bind them in poverty and enslave them to serve their interests. What do farmers do to earn an income while waiting to harvest tobacco? What do they eat? During this year's budget day, President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni said: "The present under-performance of the agriculture sector is caused by two factors: some families earn no money at all - they just produce food if at all; others, produce for cash; but produce low-value crops such as maize and tobacco on a small scale (one acre or less). These low-value crops or activities are only profitable if you produce them on a big scale (20 acres)". Nagenda, poor people must not grow tobacco at all. A grass-thatched house with a crude permanent structure used as a bed, a toxin paraffin lamp and no granary - that is poverty you can touch. Poor people should invest in cost-effective enterprises such as zero-grazing, fruits, fish farming, poultry, piggery, bee-keeping and others to supplement their food source and also get an income. Nagenda did state his interests in BAT as board member. I have interests too. My father died of cancer of the throat - from too much smoking. But I have never decampaigned smoking, because I think it is an adult choice people make. At least I know he had a choice not to but he chose to smoke. I actually have a cigarette stick hung on our Christmas tree every year in his memory. But poverty and environmental destruction are not personal choices. People are pushed in desperate situations to destroy nature and eventually destroy themselves. That is why Prof. Bukenya said we must live in harmony with nature. Bukenya's floppy hat, which incidentally Nagenda admits he also owns, is not a fashion statement, it means getting down to see, feel and know what the people who bring in sh50b for Ugandans use their money for. It is time Nagenda got down to some of his most ordinary tobacco farmers in West Nile and smell the cooking in their pots. Tobacco companies in Uganda must do more to protect mother nature and its people. Trees are cut down to provide fuel for the curing process and for the construction of the curing barns. Deforestation in developing countries accounts for 1.5% of global net losses of forest cover or 4.6% of total national deforestation. To address shortage of woodfuel needed for tobacco curing, tobacco companies encourage farmers to plant trees. But this is not a solution to the problems associated with climate change as the plantations set up by tobacco companies, including BAT, consist largely of non-native, fast-growing eucalyptus and cypress that adversely affect biodiversity and can lower the water table. Enditem