Written By | Staff Writer
The government flagged off 173,913 bags of fertiliser at Entebbe on August 31
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A promise, flagged off
On the morning of August 31, at the headquarters of the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries in Entebbe, Agriculture Minister Frank Tumwebaze waved off two lorry consignments carrying the first of 173,913 bags of fertiliser. Each bag weighs 50 kilogrammes. All of it is free to the farmer. And, in this first tranche, almost all of it is going to tea.
The launch closes a loop that opened at a Cabinet sitting at State House Entebbe a week earlier, when ministers resolved to procure and distribute fertiliser under a presidential directive. That resolution was a decision on paper. What moved on Monday was a physical supply chain: bags manufactured by ITRACOM Fertilizers Uganda SMC Ltd, tested at Makerere University laboratories, allocated through sub-regional lists, and timed to reach growers before the August–November planting window closes.
Maj. Gen. David Kasura Kyomukama, the ministry's permanent secretary, told journalists at the flag-off that laboratory results had confirmed the consignment met national and international standards and was "safe, effective and fit for purpose" — an unusually defensive framing for a giveaway, and a telling one. State Minister for Agriculture Desire Muhooza said smallholders in tea, coffee, cocoa and other strategic crops would all receive the inputs at no cost, with tea simply first in the queue.
Why tea went first
The sequencing is not accidental. Uganda's tea sector has spent three years in something close to freefall, and the fertiliser question sits at the centre of the diagnosis its own growers offer.
Canon Apollo Buzaare Turyamusiima, chairman of the Uganda Tea Outgrowers Association, put the arithmetic bluntly at the Entebbe ceremony. For more than three years, he said, tea farmers had been hunting for fertiliser with the right nutrient profile and reliable quality. In its absence — and with adulterated and counterfeit product circulating widely — leaf quality fell, and with it the price. The farm-gate rate for green leaf dropped from Shs360 per kilogramme to as low as Shs150.
That is a wage cut of nearly 60 percent for a crop that is plucked, not harvested seasonally, and that therefore sets a household's weekly cash income. It is the reason plantations across Kigezi, Toro and Bushenyi have been abandoned or left unpruned, and the reason the sector has been warning that more than 100,000 jobs — pluckers, factory hands, transporters, input dealers — sit on the wrong side of the ledger.
Turyamusiima also placed the fertiliser inside a larger, unfinished promise. Two years ago in Bushenyi, he recounted, President Museveni pledged a package worth Shs152 billion to help tea factories clear debts accumulated during the Covid-19 period, with a further Shs112 billion earmarked for nursery growers and Shs46 billion for pruning and fertiliser. Monday's flag-off, in his reading, was the fertiliser component finally arriving. "If every tea farmer gets these fertilisers, then we shall have quality green leaf," he said. "It is from quality green leaf that we make quality tea, which fetches a good price at the auction. With quality green leaf, we believe the farm gate price will rise to Shs600 per kg."
The number behind the number
Shs600 would be a quadrupling from the floor, and roughly a 70 percent gain on the pre-crisis Shs360. It is a striking target, and it rests on a chain of assumptions worth separating out, because they run in different directions.
The first link — fertiliser improves leaf quality — is well supported. Uganda's soils are among the most nutrient-depleted in the region, and national fertiliser application sits at roughly 1 to 2.4 kilogrammes per hectare against an agronomic requirement the ministry itself puts at 80 to 100 kilogrammes. Kenya applies about 32 kg/ha; Rwanda about 29. On tea specifically, nitrogen availability directly shapes shoot vigour, leaf size and the two-leaves-and-a-bud plucking standard that separates auction-grade tea from filler.
The second link — better leaf earns a better auction price — is where the story leaves Ugandan soil and enters a market the country does not control. At the Mombasa auction, Ugandan tea has been fetching around US$0.79 per kilogramme against US$2.22 for Kenyan and US$2.46 for Rwandan lots. Some of that gap is quality. But a substantial share is structural: Uganda's tea is predominantly lower-grade CTC sold into a thin band of price-sensitive markets, national production has fallen from over 60 million kilogrammes to roughly 40 million, and the global slump that followed the Russia–Ukraine war and Middle East instability compressed prices across the board. Fertiliser addresses the quality component. It does nothing about grade mix, marketing or the auction's oversupply.
The third link — better auction prices reach the farmer — is the one growers have least reason to trust. Uganda's tea value chain is dominated by factories that set farm-gate prices with limited transparency, a dynamic that mirrors the disputes running through sugarcane and barley. Encouragingly, factories in Kigezi recently lifted green leaf from Shs250 to Shs450 per kilogramme, which suggests some pass-through is possible when leaf is scarce and quality improves. Whether that holds once volumes recover is the open question.
The equity problem nobody flagged off
There is a second issue the ceremony did not address: who is not in the queue.
The 173,913 bags are explicitly targeted at what the ministry calls "strategic and high-value" crops — tea first, then coffee and cocoa. All three are export earners. None of them is eaten. That is a defensible industrial-policy choice: coffee alone brought in roughly US$2.3 billion in the last full export year, and the tea sector's collapse is a live fiscal and employment problem.
But the targeting lands awkwardly against the rest of the current agricultural news. In Acholi, local government leaders reported in late August that roughly 69,400 households had suffered crop failure, with some sub-counties recording near-total loss. Karamoja has been running a hunger emergency for months. Both crises are in food crops — sorghum, millet, cassava, beans — and neither will see a bag of this fertiliser. A programme designed to restore soil fertility is, in its first phase, restoring the soil under the crops that feed the treasury rather than the ones that feed households.
That may still be the right sequencing if the export earnings recycle. It is worth watching whether they do.
The counterfeit shadow
Kasura Kyomukama's insistence on Makerere's laboratory certification points at the programme's most immediate operational risk. Dan Musoke, a coffee grower with the Kalagala Coffee Farmers Association in Luwero who spoke at the launch, listed counterfeit fertiliser alongside high input costs, poor-quality seed and coffee leaf rust as the industry's defining frustrations. The Uganda National Bureau of Standards has estimated that 30 to 40 percent of seed on the market is counterfeit; the input trade more broadly has a similar reputation.
A free-distribution programme is unusually exposed to this. Bags that cost the farmer nothing acquire a resale value the moment they leave the allocation list, and leakage into the commercial market creates an arbitrage counterfeiters can hide inside. The ministry has certification and an allocation procedure; what it has not published is last-mile traceability — the equivalent of the QR-coded Seed Tracking and Traceability System now rolling out for seed.
A domestic industry, quietly
The least-discussed element of Monday's launch may be the most consequential. ITRACOM's country representative, Jean-Luc Bigirimana, traced the consignment back to a presidential directive of October 12, 2023 for a fertiliser factory at Kampiringisa in Mpigi District. The bags flagged off in Entebbe were manufactured in Uganda.
Tumwebaze framed this as the point: "With Government providing the necessary support and guaranteeing a market for the product, we expect increased local production and greater competition, which should ultimately contribute to more affordable fertiliser for our farmers." In other words, the free distribution is also an offtake guarantee — a demand floor that lets a domestic manufacturer reach scale in a market where import parity pricing has historically put fertiliser out of smallholder reach.
That is a real industrial argument. It also concentrates risk. A single supplier holding a guaranteed government offtake is a procurement structure that has, in other Ugandan value chains, produced exactly the pricing and quality disputes the programme is trying to solve. The Makerere testing regime is the safeguard. It will need to be permanent and published, not a launch-day assurance.
What to watch
Three things will tell whether this becomes a turning point or a photo opportunity. First, delivery data: how many of the 173,913 bags physically reach registered outgrowers, by sub-region, and how quickly. Second, the coffee and cocoa tranches — their size and timing will reveal whether tea was genuinely first or simply the crop with the loudest association. Third, the Kigezi and Toro farm-gate price in the January–March window, once fertilised leaf reaches the factories.
Tumwebaze's own recommendation at the launch was arguably the most durable thing said there: that farmers return to evidence-based practice, test their soils, and apply the right nutrient at the right rate at the right time. Free fertiliser without soil testing is a guess at scale. Uganda has the extension architecture to do better, if it chooses to fund it. The bags are moving. The agronomy has to move with them.
