President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has assured Ugandans that the country has a ready market for their value-added products.
“If you do agriculture and then add value to your products through a processing factory, you will need a third step and that is market. If they don’t buy your products, you’ll lose out. Fortunately, as a country, we have our own market, we have that of East Africa and Africa at large. Another good thing is we also have a ready market in Eastern Europe and China,” President Museveni said.
The President made the remarks during his virtual message to Ugandans on Tuesday 27th June 2023.
He explained that the new market of Eastern Europe and China is a unique one since they prefer buying already finished goods, unlike the Western powers who exploit Africans by buying their raw materials at low prices.
“Instead of buying raw materials like how some Western countries have been doing, these people from Eastern Europe are willing to buy our finished goods. For instance, when it comes to our coffee, we sell it unprocessed at 2 US dollars per kilogram and the wise people process and add value to it and in turn, they sell it at 40 US dollars per kilogram,” President Museveni stated.
“I don’t want you to miss out on this chance. Those who are growing coffee, you grow, those adding value to it, do so and you get a share from the 40 US dollars. If the one running a factory here gets like 30 US dollars, it can prompt him to also increase the price of unprocessed coffee from the farm; instead of giving the farmer 2 US dollars, he can decide to give me 5 US dollars,” he added.
On the other hand, President Museveni urged Ugandans to get involved in commercial agriculture with “ekibaalo” (calculation) and also embrace government programs such as Parish Development Model (PDM) and Emyooga in order to enhance their household incomes.
“Now the youth who don’t want to engage in agriculture should undertake vocational and technical training. We have given the households PDM money, and now the young ones who don’t want to soil themselves should acquire vocational skills. And through Emyooga, they will get working capital to push their enterprises,” he advised.
“The rich people should not go for PDM or Emyooga; they should go to Uganda Development Bank (UDB) for low-interest loans which they may use to push their large-scale agricultural ventures or want to start up factories.”