Why beekeeping has remained a big but untapped potential in Uganda

Beekeeping is an old art that has been practiced in Uganda for a very long time and several studies have concluded that Uganda’s honey is of good quality for it comes from natural forests and is produced by healthy bees .Therefore, beekeeping provides an excellent opportunity for rural communities to jump out of poverty. Government of Uganda has earmarked beekeeping as one of one of the national strategic interventions under Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) and the Plan for Modernization of Agriculture (PMA) to support income generation for rural communities and for export. Furthermore, the Uganda Export Promotion Board has designed the honey export strategy. There are also several private sector initiatives in support of beekeeping.

Despite all these efforts, small-scale producers using traditional hives continue to dominate the beekeeping industry. Farm management practices are still traditional and subsistence in nature. An analysis of Uganda’s exports for the last five years indicates that honey and other hive products hardly feature on the list of exports.

The draft National Apiculture Policy for Uganda (2004) puts the number of beekeepers in Uganda at 80,000 producing 5,000 tons of honey annually. However, these figures are questionable because there is no system in place to collect even basic data on beekeeping. Therefore, no one knows exactly how many beekeepers are in Uganda, how much honey is being produced per season and how big is the national honey markert.Although no reliable data is available, anecdotal evidence suggests that the local market for honey is significant and demand outstrips supply.

For example, on the domestic market, the prices per ton of raw honey are much higher than international raw honey prices. Findings from interactions with beekeepers at Arua Park in Kampala indicate that some honey is currently being informally imported from Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo.

The pertinent questions that have remained unanswered are, What needs to be done to unlock the potential of beekeeping and are government and private sector initiatives aimed at improving beekeeping in Uganda quick fixes or real solutions to the problem?

Minutes of meetings by the Beekeeping Multi-stakeholder Platform (BMSP) and The Uganda National Apiculture Development Organization indicate that inadequate information on the profitability of beekeeping, lack of reliable data for investment decisions making and failure by government to finalize the formulation the National Apiculture Policy which has remained in draft form since 2004 are the major bottlenecks to improved beekeeping in Uganda. There are also very few and scattered cases of model beekeepers that can demonstrate and convince others that beekeeping is profitable. To make matter worse, the interventions of government, donors and NGOs are uncoordinated and haphazard. Instead of using a value chain approach to identify and address constraints along the whole chain, they prefer to use a “catchment area approach” Yet the performance of one segment of the value chain affects the growth of all other segments.

Likewise, evidence from most districts of western Uganda, suggests that the major constraints are the low rate of hive colonization and beekeepers limited knowledge on improved beekeeping technologies such as queen rearing and colony dividing.

Therefore, there is need for government to urgently finalize the National Apiculture Policy and ensure that its provisions and recommendations are fully implemented. There is also need for bodies such Uganda National Bureau of Statistics and National Planning Authority to provide reliable data on beekeeping in Uganda. There is also need to put more emphasis on improving beekeepers skills through carefully conducted demonstrations instead of conventional trainings for beekeepers.

Ambrose Bugaari

Enterprise Development Specialist