Uganda’s sugarcane boom leaves families hungry: what needs to change

Busoga, in eastern Uganda, is a low, fertile plateau surrounded on three sides by Lake Victoria, the River Nile and Lake Kyoga. Most of its 4.3 million people farm small, rain-fed plots. Yet hunger is common: in the 2024 census, about a third of Busoga households reported going whole days without food.

Sugarcane has been grown commercially here since the 1920s, when one family established a large sugar processing facility. New investors followed after the government stopped setting sugar prices and opened the industry to the private sector in 1991.

Seven mills now operate in and around the Busoga region, with the amount of sugar cane planted tripling in size between 2000 and 2024. Tens of thousands of families also grow cane on their own land as “outgrowers”, selling this on contracts to the sugar mills.

I spent over 20 years working in Uganda's civil service before becoming an academic. For my doctoral research, I set out to understand why decades of sugarcane growth had not reduced hunger in Busoga. I visited two parts of Busoga – the Jinja and Buyende districts – and interviewed 27 officials, local leaders and farmer representatives. I also asked four groups of farmers for their views.

I asked who decides how land is used, who signs contracts, who receives the money, and how households eat while waiting for the harvest.

My research found that the hunger in Busoga isn't caused by farmers not growing enough sugarcane to sell. The prices of sugarcane are dropping, but my research found that the main problem is that sugar mills mainly sign contracts with men.

This means that decisions about what to use land and cash for are solely in the hands of the men. They don't always use the cash to feed their families. The work of feeding families falls mainly on women, who are left only with the option of planting what little land is left with food crops.

To solve the problem, the government and sugar companies all need to end the practice of only contracting with men, set up contracts with women farmers too and make sure that women from sugarcane farming families inherit contracts automatically when their husbands die.

One fifth of the land, all the responsibility

Only about 20% of the available farmland in the Jinja and Buyende districts of Busoga is available to grow food crops. Up to 80% of farmland owned by families is used to grow sugarcane to sell.

Mills recruit sugarcane farmers through male household heads, whose names appear on the contracts. In one focus group, women described husbands signing multi-year contracts covering the family's entire land without consulting them. When they questioned this, the women were told the decision was not theirs.

The payment, a lump sum at harvest, is made to whoever signed the contract. A political leader in Buyende, speaking anonymously, told me that many men now keep the cane money and don't use it to buy food for the home.

Uganda's Land Act says family land cannot be sold, leased, or mortgaged without a spouse's written consent. But cane deals rarely go through a land office, so no one checks if consent is being given.

A widow inherits the cane, but not the contract

Uganda's constitution recognises the right of women to inherit land. Yet my research found that when an outgrower dies, the contract usually remains in his name, and his widow has no standing with the mill.

The mill's recruitment agent, who signs up farmers, might decide not to allow her to take over her husband's contract. A clan meeting may instead hand the land to a male relative. A bank may refuse her credit without a man's signature. Although this is not legal, my research found that it is common practice and the government hasn't put in place any way of stopping it.

Government extension officers, who advise farmers, visit only registered contract holders, and don't advise the wives of contract holders. Researchers call this the gap between holding a right and being able to use it.

In some cases, young men inherit the family's land but then sell it to pay for a motorcycle, school fees, or a family obligation. With the land gone, many end up cutting and loading cane for daily wages. A technical officer in Buyende told me that most of those workers are children. Uganda's employment law bars this, but enforcement is weak: one study found that there were only 83 labour officers in Uganda, but that 1,344 were needed to make sure that labour laws were not being broken.

What needs to happen next

All the different organisations in the sugar industry have a role to play in protecting the rights of women in sugarcane growing families.

First, the sugar mills should stop signing contracts with males only. Kidera Sugar, a new mill in Buyende that opened in 2026, is now recruiting outgrowers, and has not set its contracting rules yet, so there's an opportunity for at least this sugar mill to introduce practices where women benefit equally.

Second, the Sugar Industry Stakeholders Council, the sugar industry regulator, gives mills their licences. It could change the situation by refusing to approve contracts without both spouses' signatures in the case of married couples. It could also start a new practice of requiring that all contracts pass on to widows. It could even make a rule that widows should retain a share of each farm's food crops.

Third, district land offices could register cane agreements so the Land Act's consent rule applies. Fourth, the labour ministry should fund the jobs of more inspectors in cane-growing areas.

As contract farming spreads, who signs the contract can determine who controls the income and whether the family has enough to eat.

James Kintu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

By James Kintu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Governance and Sustainability, UMass Boston