Kampala
For a Ugandan farmer, the hardest part of the season is often not the planting or the weeding but what happens after the harvest is in. A World Bank Group assessment cited by Parliament's opposition benches puts a number on that pain: between 22 and 30 percent of Uganda's crop harvest is lost after it leaves the field, undone by poor storage, weak handling systems and a policy framework that has not kept pace with how farmers actually sell what they grow.
That statistic sits at the heart of a five-year legislative agenda unveiled this month by the Opposition in Uganda's 12th Parliament, which places agriculture — and a long-stalled Contract Farming Bill in particular — among its top priorities for the 2026/27 to 2030/31 term. The document, titled the Opposition Legislative Priorities, was presented by the Leader of the Opposition, Joel Ssenyonyi, during the induction of newly elected Opposition MPs, and lays out a roadmap of bills, motions and committee work the bloc intends to pursue regardless of how thin its numbers are on the floor of the House.
"Our role as the Opposition is to provide constructive scrutiny, offer practical alternatives, and ensure that public policies and programmes genuinely improve the lives of our people," Ssenyonyi told the gathering, framing the agenda as an alternative to what he described as government programmes that have not translated into improved livelihoods for the roughly 70 percent of Ugandans who depend on agriculture for their income.
A LAW THAT KEEPS COMING BACK
The centrepiece of the package is not a new idea. The Contract Farming Bill has been circulating in various forms since 2023: introduced that year, reviewed by Parliament's Committee on Agriculture in 2025 — which recommended its enactment, with amendments — and then withdrawn in March 2026, officially over timing and the need for broader stakeholder alignment. Its reappearance now, repackaged as an Opposition priority rather than a government bill, is as much a statement about unfinished business as it is a new proposal.
The logic behind the bill has not changed. Contract farming, in which a buyer — a processor, an exporter, an agribusiness — agrees in advance to purchase a farmer's crop, is widely promoted across East Africa as a way to give smallholders guaranteed markets, access to inputs and a measure of price certainty. In Uganda it has expanded organically in sectors from tea and sugarcane to poultry and horticulture, often through informal or loosely written arrangements between companies and farmer groups. The Opposition's proposal would put rules around that relationship: standard terms for contracts, price-setting mechanisms, obligations around input provision, insurance requirements and a formal process for resolving disputes when a buyer under-delivers on price or a farmer breaches supply terms.
The absence of such a framework, the priorities document argues, leaves farmers exposed. "These gaps in legislation and policy hold back the full commercialisation of agriculture, weaken risk management, quality control and post-harvest handling, and limit the sector's contribution to household income and food security," it states. The East African Business Council has separately argued that contract farming, properly regulated, has the capacity to meaningfully reduce the kind of losses the World Bank figures describe — but only if farmers are protected from being locked into unfavourable terms by better-resourced buyers.
BEYOND THE FARM GATE
The Contract Farming Bill is presented as one piece of a wider package targeting what happens between harvest and sale. A proposed National Post-Harvest Management Policy would set storage standards, offer subsidies for storage infrastructure and introduce warehouse receipt systems — a financing tool, common in more developed grain markets, that lets farmers borrow against stored crops rather than selling immediately at harvest-time low prices. The Opposition frames this as the direct mechanism for cutting into the 22-to-30-percent loss figure, since much of that waste occurs not in the field but in the weeks and months after harvest, when maize rots in poorly ventilated stores or beans are damaged by pests before reaching a buyer.
Alongside it sits a proposed Agricultural Finance Policy and specialised lending frameworks, responding to what the document calls persistently limited access to affordable credit — a complaint echoed in Bank of Uganda's own Q1 2026 credit conditions survey, which recorded a tightening in agricultural lending even as the sector remains the country's largest employer. A National Agricultural Mechanisation Policy would aim to lift Uganda's low rates of farm mechanisation, which the Opposition and agricultural economists alike cite as a structural constraint on the sector's ability to compete regionally.
The numbers underpinning the case are drawn from the Ministry of Finance: agriculture contributes 26.5 percent of Uganda's GDP, employs about 70 percent of the working population, and accounts for roughly 35 percent of export earnings. Yet, the document notes, farmers continue to contend with counterfeit seeds and agrochemicals, low mechanisation and finance that remains largely out of reach — a gap between the sector's macroeconomic weight and the lived reality of the people who work in it.
TEA, COCOA, COUNTERFEITS
The agenda also proposes a National Tea and Cocoa Policy aimed at strengthening those two value chains, alongside amendments to the Agricultural Chemicals Act and the Seeds Act intended to sharpen enforcement and introduce greater traceability of farm inputs — a direct response to a problem regulators have flagged repeatedly this year, including a national seed-traceability push and a phase-out of hazardous agrochemicals announced by the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries. The Opposition argues that counterfeit inputs continue to undermine productivity and expose farmers to losses that better regulation could prevent.
LIVESTOCK, DAIRY AND FISH
The reform agenda extends well past crop farming. On livestock, the Opposition wants amendments to the Animal Diseases Act to introduce mandatory traceability systems, incentives for value addition, and disease surveillance linked to export standards — an acknowledgment that Uganda's cross-border livestock trade remains largely informal and lacks the documentation increasingly demanded by international markets, including the Gulf states and Nigeria, where Ugandan dairy and meat exporters have been chasing new deals this year. A proposed National Livestock Identification and Traceability Act would go further, requiring compulsory registration and tagging of livestock nationwide — the kind of system several of Uganda's competitors in the regional beef and dairy trade already operate.
The dairy sector gets its own attention, with proposed amendments to the Dairy Industry Act aimed at establishing fair minimum pricing mechanisms and formal dispute-resolution procedures, responding to recurring pricing conflicts between processors and farmers that have flared periodically as Uganda's milk production has grown past 5.4 billion litres a year.
On fisheries, the Opposition points to a structural weakness it says leaves fishing communities exposed to overexploitation: co-management arrangements between government and fishing communities that lack a firm legal foundation. It proposes amendments to the Fisheries and Aquaculture Act to formalise community co-management, plus a standalone Aquaculture Act to set clear rules on licensing, site selection and environmental management for fish farming and cage culture — an increasingly important part of Uganda's fisheries sector as wild-catch stocks on Lake Victoria and other water bodies come under sustained pressure from overfishing.
WHAT IT WOULD TAKE
None of this becomes law simply because it appears in an opposition priorities document. As a minority bloc in the 12th Parliament, the Opposition's ability to move its own bills through to enactment is limited, and the Contract Farming Bill's own history — introduced, reviewed, recommended for passage, then withdrawn — is a reminder of how easily agricultural legislation stalls even with cross-party support. Ssenyonyi's own framing acknowledges this: the priorities document is pitched less as a legislative certainty and more as a five-year roadmap for "constructive scrutiny" and "practical alternatives" — pressure applied through motions, committee oversight and budget advocacy as much as through bills the Opposition itself cannot guarantee will pass.
But the scale of the ambition is itself notable. Taken together, the proposals would touch nearly every layer of Uganda's agricultural economy — from the seed a farmer plants, to the contract that governs what happens to the crop, to the storage that determines whether it survives to market, to the traceability records that decide whether a cow or a fish can be sold abroad. For a sector that employs seven in ten working Ugandans but has long been characterised by informality, the test now is whether any of it moves from priority list to statute book — and whether, if it does, enforcement can catch up with the ambition on paper.
