By. Damba Rogers.
The commissioner, water resources planning and regulation, in the water and environment ministry, Dr. Callist Tindimugaya is expressing worries over the country’s low productivity of water, saying this has continued to impact on the quality and quantities of products produced in the country.
According to Dr. Callist, water productivity in Uganda per year stands at 10% which is very low yet the country receives a total of 1000mm of rain per year.”With this amount of water provided by the rain is more than enough to facilitate agriculture transformation among other economic and domestic activities if management well.” Says Callist.
He notes that three years back, Uganda received 44 billion cubic meters of water annually, 69% of this water was coming from Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzanian with 31% originating from Uganda but this water was wrongly being used by Ugandans. But most of this water was not utilized and lost to other countries up stream and the rest wasted through pollution.
Callist maintains that water is going to be very key in Uganda’s transformation hence the need to urgently handle it well by having proper storage capacities.
The Professor at the college of agriculture and environmental science Makerere university, Tenywa Moses adds that of the 1000mm of rain received by Uganda in a year, we only manage to produce 1.5 tones of maize per hectare against the scientifically projected 10 tones of maize per hectare.
Mr. Tenywa further notes that these are very low figure in agriculture the back bone of a country like Uganda.
He also couples it with poor soil management by farmers who till the gardens year in year out without giving it time to rest as one way to gain its fertility for higher productivity.
He therefore asks Ugandans to start thinking of irrigating their gardens and drop the common knowledge of waiting for the seasonal rains to practice agriculture is they are to register increased farm produce as well as fight the rooming food insecurity.
With all the above going on in the midst of scientist, they are planning better strategies on how they will sensitize Ugandans on how to manage nature resources at their disposal as they go on with daily economic and domestic activities in a bid to improve their livelihoods.
The experts now feel teaching ugandans to do water harvesting by constructing water tanks for domestic use, digging valley dams for agriculture and other economic use is the way to go coupled with advanced government technologies that will involve water treatment for other use.
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