Kampala
For years, a Ugandan farmer walking into an agro-input shop to buy pesticide, veterinary medicine or animal feed has had almost no reliable way of knowing whether what is on the shelf is genuine. Counterfeiters have flooded the market with fake and substandard chemicals, watered-down veterinary drugs and mislabelled feeds, while the agencies meant to police them have operated in silos, chasing different pieces of the same problem without a shared mandate or a shared database.
On August 25, 2026, the government took its most decisive step yet to fix that. Agriculture minister Frank Tumwebaze tabled the Food and Agriculture Regulatory Authority Bill, 2026, for its first reading in Parliament, proposing to fold food safety, veterinary medicine, agricultural chemicals and animal feed regulation into a single new authority. The Bill has since been referred to Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries for detailed scrutiny, with MPs expected to report back to the House within 45 working days.
If passed, it would be one of the most consequential pieces of agricultural legislation in years — not because it creates new money for farmers, as so many recent government interventions have promised, but because it rewires the plumbing of a regulatory system that officials themselves admit is broken.
A “troubling picture” laid bare in the Bill’s own memorandum
The most striking thing about the Bill is not its structure but its candour. Its explanatory memorandum, cited by New Vision, states plainly that Uganda is “flooded with counterfeit substandard veterinary medicines and agricultural chemicals.” It goes on to warn of medicine and chemical residues, aflatoxins, harmful microorganisms and heavy metals turning up in food and feed — contaminants that compromise both public health and the credibility of Uganda’s agricultural exports.
The root cause, according to the memorandum, is “fragmented regulation”: multiple agencies overseeing different slices of the same value chain, duplicating effort in some areas while leaving gaps in others, and failing to coordinate enforcement. The absence of one body with clear authority over the whole food and agriculture chain, it argues, “undermines the effectiveness of regulation” and leaves farmers, processors and exporters uncertain about which rules actually apply to them.
That diagnosis will resonate with anyone who has followed Uganda’s agriculture sector over the past year. In July, the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) announced a phased ban and restriction of hazardous agrochemicals, citing 1,599 pesticide poisoning deaths recorded between 2017 and 2022 — a crisis advocacy groups blamed partly on a thriving counterfeit agrochemical market. In August, MAAIF also rolled out a Seed Tracking and Traceability System after industry estimates suggested that 30 to 40 percent of seed sold in Uganda could be counterfeit. Each of those interventions targeted one input at a time. The new Bill is an attempt to stop fighting the problem input by input and instead build one institution with the legal teeth to tackle all of them.
What the new authority would actually do
The proposed Food and Agriculture Regulatory Authority would be a body corporate with perpetual succession, governed by a nine-member board appointed by the minister — a chairperson, six members with expertise spanning veterinary medicine, agriculture, pharmacy, standards and environmental science, and two representatives nominated by a recognised farmers’ federation.
Its mandate, as laid out across the Bill’s 13 parts, 101 clauses and three schedules, is sweeping. It would regulate the manufacture, processing, importation, exportation, distribution, transportation, advertising, labelling, storage, sale and supply of veterinary medicines, veterinary devices and equipment, and agricultural chemicals and their application equipment. It would also take charge of food and feed manufacturing and safety, set standards, inspect and certify agricultural inputs, and — crucially — establish traceability systems that would let regulators and buyers alike track a product from factory or farm to shelf.
On the ground, that would translate into inspectors and analysts with powers to enter and inspect premises, take samples for testing, seize adulterated products, and order the detention, return or destruction of non-compliant consignments. The authority would also license manufacturers, distributors, fumigators and commercial chemical applicators, and would have the power to recall products already in circulation and to manage prohibited, banned, restricted, falsified or adulterated goods. On the food side, it would inspect food premises, certify meat and fish for public consumption, regulate processed and semi-processed foods, and oversee food storage and transport — while explicitly prohibiting the use of radioactive materials, heavy metals and other banned substances in food, backed by a residue-monitoring regime to detect contamination.
To make room for this new body, the Bill proposes repealing two existing laws outright — the Agricultural Chemicals (Control) Act and the Food and Drugs Act — and amending four others: the Dairy Industry Act, the Fisheries and Aquaculture Act, the National Coffee Act and the Animal Feeds Act. The minister would retain the power to issue written policy directions to the authority, preserving a degree of political oversight even as day-to-day enforcement moves to the new body.
Why this matters beyond Kampala’s committee rooms
For ordinary farmers, the stakes of getting this right are large and concrete. Uganda’s crop protection officials have repeatedly flagged counterfeit agrochemicals as a driver of pest and disease outbreaks, because fake or diluted products fail to control the pests they are sold to kill — leaving crops exposed and farmers out of pocket twice over, once for the useless product and again for the lost harvest. Watered-down veterinary medicines have a similar effect on livestock health, undermining vaccination and treatment campaigns that the government has invested heavily in, from foot-and-mouth disease vaccination drives to anthrax and Newcastle disease control.
The export dimension may matter just as much. Uganda’s agricultural exporters have been stung repeatedly by rejections in demanding markets over aflatoxin contamination and residue violations — the Eastern Africa Grain Council has estimated potential regional trade losses of $577 million tied to aflatoxin risk alone, with Shs32.8 billion in Ugandan export rejections since 2023. A single, credible regulator with real traceability systems could help exporters demonstrate compliance to European, Middle Eastern and regional buyers more convincingly than today’s patchwork of agencies can. Government officials argue the reform could also strengthen Uganda’s hand in regional and international markets more broadly, from the East African Community to COMESA and the African Continental Free Trade Area.
The road ahead — and the reasons for caution
None of this happens automatically. The Bill now goes to the Agriculture Committee, where MPs are expected to pick apart its regulatory, institutional and enforcement provisions, and where the public — including industry experts, farmer groups and the very agencies being merged or stripped of authority — will be invited to weigh in. Uganda’s legislative history offers a caution here: a Contract Farming Bill introduced in 2023 was reviewed and then withdrawn as recently as March 2026 after failing to secure consensus, a reminder that ambitious agricultural legislation does not always survive the committee process intact.
There are also harder questions the committee will need to answer. Merging several existing mandates into one body means an inevitable transition period during which registration, licensing and inspection functions could be disrupted, even as the counterfeit problem the Bill is meant to solve continues in real time. Funding is another open question: an effective inspectorate with laboratory capacity, sampling equipment and enough staff to cover Uganda’s sprawling agro-dealer network does not come cheap, and the Bill’s memorandum is light on how the new authority will be resourced relative to the combined budgets of the agencies it would absorb. Farmers’ groups will also be watching closely to see whether the two seats reserved for farmer representatives on the nine-member board translate into real influence, or whether the authority ends up dominated by technical and ministerial appointees.
Still, the ambition on display is notable. Rather than adding another subsidy programme or another short-term input distribution drive — the default policy tool of the past year, from fertiliser handouts to seedling programmes — the government is for once attempting a structural fix: rebuilding the institutional foundation on which input quality, food safety and export credibility all ultimately rest. Whether Parliament preserves that ambition through 45 working days of committee scrutiny, or whittles it down the way it did the Contract Farming Bill, will determine whether Uganda’s farmers finally get a regulator with the authority to tell real chemicals from fake ones — or simply another well-intentioned law that never quite delivers.
