Quality losses lock Uganda out of regional grain markets

KAMPALA, Uganda — Uganda grows more grain than it consumes and sits within reach of a dozen countries that do not. Converting that mismatch into sales is where the business breaks down.

Traders, millers and government officials meeting Thursday at the Eastern Africa Grain Council’s members and stakeholders networking reception at Hotel Africana in Kampala said contamination and inconsistent standards are stripping value out of Ugandan grain before it reaches a buyer — and in some cases turning shipments back at the border.

Paul Ochuna, the council’s country programs manager, described the commercial logic plainly. Uganda is a surplus producer, the council operates in 11 countries across the region, and many of those markets run grain and pulse deficits. That should be a seller’s position. Instead, he said, grain destined for export has been rejected on quality, and smallholders lack the tools to prevent it.

“There is a lot of contamination simply because the smallholder farmers don’t have the required tools,” Ochuna said.

Herbert Kyeyamwa, the council’s Uganda country director, said the losses recur annually, with significant volumes of grain failing to meet acceptable safety thresholds and losing value as a result.

“Aflatoxin contamination remains one of the greatest threats to food safety, public health and export competitiveness,” he said.

For millers, the losses arrive as inputs they cannot use but have already paid for.

“We are tasked to give quality, we are tasked to mill quality, but we always get low quality from the suppliers,” said Hussein Ssoozi of Tariq General Suppliers, a maize milling firm.

Ssoozi said the contamination originates after harvest rather than in the field — “maize doesn’t get aflatoxins from the gardens,” he said — leaving processors squeezed between suppliers who deliver spoiled grain and the Uganda National Bureau of Standards, which conditions certification on output quality. He summed up the chain reaction with a line borrowed from computing: garbage in, garbage out.

The council’s response has been to rebuild the mechanics of the trade itself, on the premise that documented quality commands a premium and undocumented quality commands nothing.

A council-run food testing laboratory grades commodities, records results and advises traders on where handling is failing. Farmers are organized into Grain Business Hubs that aggregate produce and operate warehouses with technical support.

Matching happens through G-Soko, a digital platform publishing a weekly catalog of buyer and seller inquiries each Thursday. Counterparties negotiate quantity, price, quality specifications and delivery, then sign contracts witnessed by the council as trade facilitator. Funds move through a council-held escrow account and are released only after inspection and confirmed delivery, with transport handled by pre-qualified carriers — a structure designed to take counterparty risk out of cross-border deals that have historically collapsed on trust.

Kyeyamwa said the council is accredited under ISO/IEC 17020 as an inspection body and runs the Grain Business Institute, which trains value chain actors in warehouse management, grain quality and regulatory compliance. The organization has operated for more than two decades and maintains a presence in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Burundi.

David Baziwaane, partnerships and ecosystem development specialist at Enterprise Uganda, said the underlying constraint is commercial literacy. His organization delivers business development services to farmer associations and cooperatives, training them to run farms as enterprises rather than subsistence operations.

“Farmers are hardworking; show them what to do and they will do it,” he said.

Compliance at origin does not guarantee passage. Baziwaane said protectionism persists among member states despite integration commitments, and called for stronger lobbying through the East African Community secretariat in Arusha, Tanzania.

“If I’m a farmer in Uganda and the aflatoxin level is so many parts per billion, I should not be stopped at Malaba border as soon as I cross it to Kenya, or at Nimule as I cross it to Sudan,” he said. “The standards should be the same.”

Naboth Namanya, commissioner for production and infrastructure at the Ministry of East African Community Affairs, said the ministry would keep pressing for harmonized standards, the removal of non-tariff barriers — which he called a menace in grain trade — and better coordinated border management, measures he said would lower the cost of doing business for exporters.

Uganda trades under the East African Community, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa and the African Continental Free Trade Area, frameworks that together open a market of hundreds of millions of consumers. But Namanya, who spoke on behalf of Permanent Secretary Edith Mwanje, said access is not the binding constraint.

“The right of access to these markets alone is not good enough,” he said. “Our businesses must also be competitive, compliant and market-ready.”

Compliance with food safety and phytosanitary rules, he added, “is no longer simply a regulatory requirement; it is actually a business opportunity that opens doors to larger and more rewarding markets.”

The reception was held under the theme “Promoting the Competitiveness of the Uganda Grain Trade Sector to the Local and Regional Markets.”