Introduce coffee agronomy in school syllabus
Mr Michael J. Ssali
What you need to know:
Uganda is known to be the birth place of Robusta Coffee and internationally we are associated with coffee which is also our biggest foreign exchange earner
Coffee plays an important role in the economic development of our country. This last season Uganda is said to have produced far more bags of coffee than the 6.3 million that were produced in 2023 and earned the country $ 1.25 billion.
This year we could produce more than 9 million bags according to a recent estimate by Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) and earn far more money in foreign currency than we did the year before.
For us who live upcountry in the coffee growing regions we see farmers paying more attention to their crop as more and more people are going into coffee production, and turning formerly idle land into coffee plantations. It even looks likely that we will hit our annual coffee production target of 20 million bags much earlier than was originally estimated.
This can be attributed to the attractive coffee prices that have resulted in mushrooming of new iron sheet roof houses, people buying cars, motorcycles, rain water tanks, and other household items.
Given the crop’s economic importance we should begin building a strong coffee production foundation by training future coffee producers. We have heard lots of our leaders and prominent people testifying that their parents paid their school fees with money obtained from coffee growing. Therefore it is high time we included coffee production in our school curriculum and even set up coffee school gardens in all the coffee growing regions to give our children the proper training and knowledge in coffee production.
Yes, coffee production and processing should become a course of study in our schools and universities. The position now is that children leave home and go to school quite early in the morning and return late in the evening too tired to do any physical work at home or to learn meaningfully about coffee farming.
The school coffee garden should be the place where learners could be introduced to various coffee good agricultural practices that address multiple environmental and production challenges. Too many of our farmers don’t even know what happens to the crop when it leaves their farm. Many don’t even really know that coffee is food and that it must be handled as such. They don’t really understand its trade.
