Food insecurity is a challenge in Africa.Uganda is a food insecure country. In Uganda, 33% of children are stunted according to a recent report. 30% of Ugandans in rural areas are below the national rural poverty line yet 87% of Ugandans live in rural areas. In Uganda, we grow enough food but we waste most of it by handling it poorly after harvesting. After harvesting when the perishable foods are
in plenty, farmers are faced with three wasteful choices; firstly consuming as much as possible and letting the remainder go bad, secondly using ineffective methods of preservation like solar or sun drying that destroy the quality of the perishable foods, or thirdly selling them to middle men at very low prices making losses despite their hard work on farms. This means that many times when production is low perhaps during the dry season, the small holder farmers have no savings and do not have enough money to afford buying food or the foodstuffs available on the market are too expensive for many people to afford forcing them to starve since they can not get enough income or food from a particular agricultural season to sustain them continuously. This is the root cause of food insecurity in Uganda which is more profound in rural areas. My business solution to food insecurity is legally registered as Baridi Stores. Baridi Stores is a warehousing business that will provide rural based cold storage warehousing for perishable foodstuffs to minimize post-harvest handling wastages. The perishable foods may include bananas, passion fruits, avocados, pineapples, mangoes, cabbages, oranges, tangerines and others. The perishables are temporarily stored safely while in the process of arranging their transport to the final markets where they are sold at good prices for reasonable profit. Each of the perishable foodstuffs is stored under its nutritionally recommended conditions to ensure its longevity before it reaches its final consumer. The cold storage will be primarily solar powered though backed up by diesel generators. The cold storage available in Uganda is in the capital city Kampala’s industrial area and at Entebbe airport mainly for export bound produce, where there is better and more stable supply of electricity to power refrigeration. There is no cold storage available in up country rural locations and districts that have more available farm land but unstable or no electricity. My approach takes advantage of the fact that Uganda is an equatorial solar belt country with 11 daily sun hours to harness that solar energy to power cold storage warehouses in rural areas where the power grid is not well established. Diesel generators will be used occasionally as emergency backups when it rains very much. Baridi Stores will set up cold storage warehouses (cold rooms) connected to solar panels and battery systems in rural areas in Uganda. The smallest cold rooms will be of 20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet in size and they will be designed having adjustable cold storage temperatures and precipitation levels. During the harvesting season, Baridi Stores will offer good prices to buy perishable foodstuffs from the small holder farmers and will find profitable markets for it. Baridi Stores will also rent out cold storage space to farmers’ associations and individual large scale farmers. I am targeting three types of customers; firstly farmer’s groups or women agricultural groups or cooperative societies, secondly individual large scale farmers or companies and thirdly small holder farmers. The first type farmers' groups collect produce from many farms that may be geographically dispersed and owned by different members and pulls resources in order to market it jointly. I believe they will prefer to rent cold storage space for their perishables in transit since they may have preferred target markets for their produce where they expect to make better profits. The second type, I believe will resemble the first group. The third type of small holder farmers, some being subsistence may not have the money to rent cold storage space. The third type consists of farmers who hold one to two acres hence do not produce large quantities. The majority of small holder farmers are women. I am offering my customers a fourth option of either firstly being able to temporarily hold their perishable foodstuffs while in transit to markets with better prices than those offered by exploitative middlemen or secondly buying the produce from them at better prices than those offered by middlemen. This is the missing ingredient in our agriculture.
