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Lawrence Seguya – Trying to make a living
from coffee
From The Coffee Chain Game
online pages.
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Credit: Geoff Sayer/Oxfam
Coffee in Mpigi: Lawrence Seguya gesturing dismissively at the coffee bushes on his smallholding. Click for larger image. |
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Geoff Sayer from Oxfam went to Uganda to visit coffee farmers and find out about their situation. He met Lawrence Seguya, a farmer who has to sell his coffee on the open market. He and his family have been hit hard by the fall in coffee prices. |
Geoff writes: We found Lawrence Seguya sitting on
a bench with two neighbours outside his house in Migamba village,
Kituntu subcounty. Behind Lawrence was his farm, the coffee bushes
overgrown with weeds. The bushes were unpruned and the blackening
cherries unpicked. Lawrence, like many of his neighbours, has given
up tending his crop, defeated by the continuing fall in the price
paid for coffee. All he has left to sell – and drink –
is ‘pombe’ (banana beer).
Lawrence says, ‘We are redundant. This is the
busy time, January, and we have nothing to do. This is the month
when we should be busy. January and June should be our busiest months.
'I have three acres of coffee with bananas. About
one in eight of the bushes is affected by wilt, but it’s the
price that has brought us down. I can’t maintain the farm.
I’ve abandoned it. I just pick the little that’s left,
but even that’s not worth doing. I can’t employ any
labour because there’s no money from the coffee. Everyone
is abandoning their coffee. For cash I take the bananas (a variety
only used for brewing), make beer and sell it.
‘It’s appalling. We can’t afford
anything. We have no cash. There are no school fees. We can’t
send children to hospital. We can’t buy sugar, salt, rice,
oil, soap, paraffin. We can only eat the food we grow, maize, beans,
cassava, sweet potatoes. Two of our girls have dropped out of secondary
school. We can’t afford to take them back.
‘I blame the President … and the open
market. Everyone is free to set their price except me. Buyers can
just set the price they want. Millers can just set the price they
want. Exporters can just set the price they want. I’d like
you tell people in your place that the drink they are enjoying is
now the cause of all our problems. We buy the crop with our sweat
and sell it for nothing. Six hundred, even 500 shillings would be
enough for us. I could return my children to school. I could replace
old bushes. If the price rose to 500 shillings today, I would pick
these few berries. I would take on people to clear the weeds, because
they would work for credit if they knew there would be a crop and
a price of 500 shillings. If the price was there the young people
would work in the coffee. Right now they just grow food, not coffee.’
> Read
Geoff’s account of his meeting with Bruno Selugo, grandson
of a coffee farmer who has to sell his coffee on the open market.
From The Coffee Chain Game
online resource.
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