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Overview of the Current Status of Uganda’s Banana Sector: Formalizing the Matooke Sector may not be the Best Policy Option



Hyejin Lee1, *
1 Institute for International Development Cooperation, Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea


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Creative Commons License
© 2023 Hyejin Lee

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.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Institute for International Development Cooperation, Konkuk University, Unit 431, Business Administration Bldg, 120 Neungdong-ro, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, South Korea, 2-450-0586; E-mail: hyejinlee@konkuk.ac.kr


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.

Keywords: Agriculture, Banana, Food security, Matooke, Uganda, Value chain.