Mr. Joshua Aijuka:

We have a memorandum of understanding with the line Ministries, including for agriculture and land, and this gives us a good platform for us to engage with government. We also try to engage with government at local level, trying to ensure that they share the benefit of our experience. We target the extension services providers on agroecology where we work and we can see a way of mainstreaming agroecology in what we do. Towards the end of this month, we are organising the national agroecology actors symposium, and together with the Minister for agriculture, the FAO and the Uganda programme, so that we can look for mechanism of how to work together on a large scale in terms of mainstreaming agroecology and the way of work, especially for the government.

This collaboration is always about dialogue and dissent. In some cases we support government to deliver these services to the people. In cases where we feel some of the interventions are not that favourable, we are there to sit at the round table and have a discussion on the proposed alternatives. We always choose dialogue. We look for solutions together and look at the alternatives and over time we earn the mutual respect to be able to sit around the table and discuss alternatives but in some case, one does not get the change that one wants and then one has to keep pushing.

A question was asked about land holdings and I forgot to respond to it. In Uganda, approximately 80% of the land is owned communally so that the land is passed on from one generation to the next. We have some land that is freehold, with title, and that can be sold. We live in a patriarchal society so men have greater powers in deciding on land use and issues of ownership. Women have access to the land and can use the land to grow crops, but they cannot transact or do anything of that nature. That is the system in which we work. It always poses a challenge where there a majority of smaller farmers move to industrial agriculture as this requires that them to be displaced through unfair land acquisition schemes because a lot of land is needed for industrial agriculture. These are some of the dynamics we need to look into, in terms of which model to promote, if we are to put the last first.