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Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Gulu Archdiocese has embarked on a joint partnership with Operation Wealth Creation – OWC to rally farmers in Acholi region to undertake large scale cassava growing. OWC is a countrywide government-led poverty eradication and sustainable wealth creation programme aimed at raising the household incomes of ordinary Ugandans.
The plan to start the partnership was hatched in October 2019 following a meeting between President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and Dr John Baptist Odama, the Archbishop of Gulu Diocese.
Speaking to URN during an interview at his Residence, Archbishop Odama revealed that the President’s invitation to make the state partnership with the Church in matters of agriculture to alleviate poverty is not strange.
Borrowing from Pope St. Paul VI Encyclical letter, Populorum Progressio (The Progress of People), saying development is the new name of peace, the Archbishop asserted that people must work together in development.
Odama explained that in 2018, the Diocese alongside OWC embarked on engaging rural farmers in Pader district on a strategy to reach out to the farmers by providing cassava plating materials.
But Cosmas Nyeko, the Chairperson of Acholibur farmers’ association in Pader district says up to 6,900 farmers in 2018 engaged in large scale commercial growing of cassava but were affected by lack of market.
Bukona Agro Processors Limited, an ethanol distilling factory established in Nwoya signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Archdiocese of Gulu to buy all the farmers’ crops, but the current constant rain is frustrating efforts by farmers to harvest and dry their cassava for marketing.
Last year, the distilling factor rallied farmers in Acholi sub-region to embark on commercial cassava farming. The factory requires more than 2,000 tonnes of both fresh and dry cassava monthly.
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