Smallholder farmers can save orphan crops

By Michael J. Ssali
Posted 


Wednesday, March 30  

2016 at 

01:00

In nearly every ethnic community, there are traditional food crops that are slowly disappearing because farmers have turned to producing more financially paying crops like maize, beans, bananas, rice, coffee, millet, sorghum and potatoes, among others.
In Buganda, for instance, crops such as mbooge, makobe, nsugga, kassukussuku mushrooms and several others are hardly mentioned, if ever at all, in government agricultural development programmes like Naads.
They are not given as much attention as bananas, cassava, coffee and cotton by research organisations. There are also bananas varieties like nakabululu whose production is declining because they are naturally smaller and less marketable than the bigger ones like kibuzi.
Yet many banana consumers know that nakabululu is tastier than kibuzi. A farmer prefers to grow a banana variety that will produce big, easily marketable bunches. Farming is commercialised and it is losing some of its cultural African heritage aspects and values.

Better position
Modern crop production methods such as use of herbicides and heavy machines do not favour the production of crops such as the kassukussuku mushroom that our grandparents used to see in a well mulched banana garden, where the weeding was done with bare hands.
Well-maintained gardens planted with a mixture of banana varieties were the best growing environment for crops like makobe, buyindiyindi and katunkuma among others. The crops are now orphaned and facing extinction. Their production should be revived because they are part of our history.
The smallholder farmers who use simple tools as hoes are in a better position to produce such crops using traditional knowledge, which has been passed on from one generation to another.
Many of the so-called orphaned crops are also associated with our cultural practices as Africans. Some crops like the kibaala type of mushroom were associated with special meals cooked and eaten at traditional functions like celebrating the birth of twins or when a bride serves her first cooked meal to her husband. The kkobe crop is a symbol for an entire clan in Buganda yet some members of the kkobe clan are not familiar with the actual crop.