Matooke unloaded in a market in Entebbe, Uganda, August 2013. Matooke or East Africa plantains (cooking bananas) are a major food and cash crop in Uganda, the largest per capita banana producer and consumer of the world. Ugandans eat on average 200 kg of matooke a year. Matooke are peeled, mashed, and steamed wrapped in banana leaves. It is eaten with stews as the main carbohydrate of the meal. It is not rare for somebody to claim they have not eaten unless their meal contained matooke. Bananas are not only important in Uganda: 70 million people in 15 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa depend on this crop for their livelihood and food supply.
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These are not food bananas. Food seller by the Kampala- Kawanda roadside, October 2012. Bananas in Uganda are commonly differentiated as food bananas (matooke) and not food bananas or dessert bananas, which is how the sweet bananas are referred to. Linguistically in Uganda the term food is used to refer to the main meal, not to snacks. Sweet bananas are nonetheless widely consumed despite their lower rank compared to their matooke cousins.
Women farmers attend a discussion group organised by Makerere University in Iganga, Uganda, July 2013. Over 80% of Ugandans live in rural areas and farm for a living, with agriculture largely practiced at the subsistence level. Women provide the majority of the labour required for food production, yet they often have very limited access to and control over resources (such as good quality land, water sources, tools and fertilisers). At the women’s feet lies a sample of Striga, a weed which accounts for massive loses to food production in the continent. The women brought the weed in hope of receiving advice on how to control it. This advice is normally provided by government agricultural extension agents, but Uganda has on average one agent per 10,000 farmers.
Matooke for the market, Nakaseke, Uganda, June 2013. African agriculture has the lowest productivity levels in the world. While raising production is a key aim for raining food security, improved access to markets is just as important. Distance to the main roads and means of transport are important barriers, especially for women farmers (women only travel on bicycles as passengers). Produce is also sold at the farm gate to middle men, but according to farmers in Nakaseke middle men share among themselves information on which households are unable to transport their produce to markets, and are therefore forced to sell below the market rates to avoid losing everything to spoilage.
Security guards training, Jinja, Uganda. Four groups of men ran down the road chanting during a training session for security guards in Jinja. Agriculture is increasingly failing to attract young people who join urban areas in search of alternative employment, often with very poor prospects. A security guard can make as little as 130,000 Ugandan shillings a month (just over ÂŁ30). They are employed by shops, restaurants and hotels, and also by many private individuals to guard their houses. This is often lamented as amounting to huge unattained human potential and loss of creativity for scores of young people in the African continent- described as a wasted generation by an African expert.
Food street vendors, Kampala-Jinja road, Uganda, April 2013. These young sellers offer their wares to vehicles stopping by the side of the road. They work for a commission.
No sex, please- we’re bananas. Kampala road side, November 2012. Ever wondered why bananas do not have seeds? They are sterile because instead of having two sets of chromosomes (like humans), edible bananas have three (they are triploid). While this sterility is essential (for humans, not bananas, that is, since fertile bananas are not edible) it comes with a high price: improving bananas by conventional breeding to increase resistance to pests and diseases is very hard. This is because conventional breeding works by combining beneficial characteristics from different cultivars through crosses (directed sexual reproduction). But bananas are strictly single (or very nearly so).
Bananas for sale by the road side. Nakaseke District, June 2013. A plentiful supply of bananas is not a given for years to come. Bananas are affected by a number of pests and diseases, of which one of the most serious is Banana Bacterial Wilt (BBW). A previously unknown disease, BBW was first described by a farmer in Mukono District in 2001. By 2008 the disease had spread to most banana growing regions of the country and reduced production by a third, compromising the livelihood of 14 million farmers and causing the UN to warn of a epidemic. BBW can be controlled by good farm management practices which prompted national information initiatives aimed at halting the spread of the disease. All sectors of society took part, including Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, who decreed a number of presidential initiatives on BBW and frequently speaks publicly to promote good practices to control BBW.
Reuben Tendo, PhD student at Ugandan National Agricultural Research Laboratories (NARL) explaining the development of hybrid bananas to journalists, April 2013. Some bananas cultivars retain very small levels of female fertility, which means that they will produce a few seeds if crossed with a fertile source of pollen. The resulting plants typically will be seeded, so another cross is required to restore sterility and produce edible plants. These are evaluated for increased resistance to pests and diseases and for consumer preferences. The main problem is that hybrids tend to taste slightly differently to traditional varieties, and acceptance is hence low. As a farmer explained, hybrids are “bananas, bananas, but not bananas�. Testing a larger number of hybrids and involving farmers and consumers in the selection process will improve this situation. The journalists are fellows on a media training programme on the principles of crop improvement, Biosciences for Farming in Africa (B4FA). Many Ugandan journalists are also farmers.
Golden bananas, National Agricultural Research Laboratories (NARL), Kawanda, Uganda, November 2012. Andrew Kiggundu, Head of the National Agricultural Biotechnology Centre (right), B4FA media fellow Gerard Tenywa, senior reported of New Vision (centre) and NARL guard (left) hold GM bananas with increased levels of vitamin A (Golden bananas). The cultivation of GM crops in Uganda is currently only allowed for research purposes under confined conditions, and not for human or animal consumption.