It was a beehive of activity yesterday evening at Serena International conference centre as suppliers and manufacturers of agricultural equipment assembled their products for an exhibition that is supposed to run alongside a two-day meeting to discuss ways to overcome some of the most daunting logistical and marketing challenges in Uganda’s agriculture.
The meeting has been dubbed as the Agribusiness Congress of East Africa, and organized by SPintelligent, a South African company with support from local partners including NAADS, the Agricultural Council of Uganda and vendors of agricultural equipment.
According to Yolanda Dos Santos, one of the event organisers, the Congress has brought together stakeholders from the agricultural value chain to meet and discuss a regional economic action plan for Agriculture that seeks to bring the producers in contact with the buyers and how each can be supported by the different intermediaries.
Organisers say the event will be held in Uganda once over the coming three years before it moves to Kenya. Previous events took place in Tanzania.
Chris Kaijuka, the Chairman of the Grain Council of Uganda, who are the co-organisers of the event, says the event will provide opportunities to farmers and other players in the agricultural value chain to interact.
Deborah Kyarasiime, the Executive Director of the Uganda Warehouse Receipt System and one of the local supporters pointed out that one of the major constraints to increased agricultural production in Uganda is the failure to link the different producers to the market.
She said meetings such as this help to remove those barriers.
