REVIEW ARTICLE
Overview of the Current Status of Uganda’s Banana Sector: Formalizing the Matooke Sector may not be the Best Policy Option
Hyejin Lee1, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2023Volume: 17
E-location ID: e18743315252945
Publisher ID: e18743315252945
DOI: 10.2174/0118743315252945231106071452
Article History:
Received Date: 31/07/2023Revision Received Date: 15/09/2023
Acceptance Date: 20/09/2023
Electronic publication date: 15/11/2023
Collection year: 2023
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Banana or matooke holds a matchless place in the Ugandan livelihoods. It serves as a food security crop, income source, main dish, cultural artifact, and other daily purposes. The crop is grown mainly for subsistence with little input investment, resulting in overall low productivity. Currently, the southwestern region of the country is the largest banana-producing area overtaking the central, and the geographical shifts are aligned with the gradual changes in the Ugandan society as well as the agro environments. Different from conventional thoughts, the matooke value chain does not appear to marginalize a particular group, farmers. Matooke producers maintain wide varietal diversity based on specific production goals, and improved hybrid adoption is low due to unique banana-plot replacement, cultivar diversity, and plantlet delivery systems. High adoption of biofortified matooke appears questionable because of genetic modification and other relevant issues. Overall, the matooke value chain seems to operate rather flexibly, being built on organized informality and social networks. This implies that pushing for a formalized system may not be the best policy decision for the matooke sector. Nonetheless, public interventions could be prioritized for improved matooke production and distribution by investing in extension services, grading criteria, and road/infrastructure.