Below is a general background to our agro-processing goals.

 

THE PROBLEM:

The absence of markets for our produce is the main challenge that keeps every farmer in our region in poverty. Farmers have no market linkages beyond village level, yet everyone is very poor, and no local demand exists within the impoverished communities themselves. This not only guarantees incomes below the poverty line, but also means, an already impoverished farmer can’t produce beyond a certain point, and can’t scale.

When coupled with our other key challenge of poor postharvest systems, the result is twofold: a) zero income, resulting both from postharvest food loss, and the absence of ready markets, and b) food insecurity, resulting both from poor postharvest management, and the fact that a farmer never realized any income from their produce in the first place, which they would have used to secure food during times of scarcity.

 

THE PROBLEM IS EVEN BIGGER:

Currently, the only crop that has a ready market in our region of Busoga, is sugarcane. Accordingly, nearly every household here grows sugarcane. And today, Busoga is “the biggest sugarcane producing sub-region” in Uganda, as highlighted here in 2024.

The most immediate result has been threefold: 1) increased hunger (as said here and here), because every household is growing sugarcane, yet sugarcane can’t be eaten as food 2). increased poverty, because sugarcane takes two years to mature and 3) even when the sugarcane finally matures, there are times when prices fall to the extent that a farmer literally earns nothing, because every farmer is growing the same crop.

 

THE SOLUTION:

Our goal is to develop a fully-fledged INTEGRATED agro-processing plant that shall create new market linkages for at least six different types of crops — enabling rural smallholder farmers in our region to diversify their incomes, and escape poverty.

Our integrated plant, once installed, will not only help place the rural poor on a self-sustainable path from  poverty — by creating reliable market linkages for various crops, minimizing post-harvest food losses, and creating new jobs — but also, since all the crops that this plant will be getting local farmers to grow on a large scale (cassava, sorghum, maize, pineapples, mangoes, passion fruits etc) are food crops, this plant will even contribute significantly to food security in our region, undoing sugarcane’s ills.

 

PLANT OWNERSHIP:

This plant will be 80% owned by ALL the rural poor farmers across Busoga who will be growing the crops this plant will be working on. See our intended Ownership Structure.

Technical assistance on installing the whole plant; building market linkages, and advice on specific crop systems will come from TechoServe, Partners in Food Solutions, AfrII, Natural Resources Institute UK, as well as specialized entities like Alvan Blanch.

If appropriate, we will also seek advice from the Uganda Development Corporation, the government agency that led the development of the Soroti Fruit Factory, and we may even seek advice elsewhere in Africa, for example the BenFruit Plant in Nigeria.

 

PLANT COMPONENTS:

a). A cereal/grain sorting, grading and threshing system (ideally from Alvan Blanch UK). This will help put our sorghum, maize and other grains on a standard where they can be used by all breweries and many other institutional buyers across East Africa.

b). A facility for producing cassava starch and/or tapioca for beer, bakery, pasta, the pharmaceutical industry, textile use, paperboard and adhesive industries, biscuit makers and yogurt producers, etc (ideally from LARSSON Sweden).

c). A production line for High Quality Cassava Flour.

d). A facility that has an hourly capacity of turning 6 – 8 tons of fresh fruit into intermediate products like purees and concentrates, or fresh fruit juice. This will either come from Alvan Blanch (UK), or from an Italian food processing equipment maker.