The COVID – 19 Pandemic effect on Agriculture and Food Security in Ugand

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the drivers of economic development since Uganda is predominately an agricultural economy
and being less developed, its key to transform agriculture in order to achieve economic growth. The growth in COVID19 cases led to limited movement from one place to another due to the stringent measures put in place to deter the
further spread of the virus and this in turn could have affected agricultural activities and food security in the country
due to high costs of food distribution and access to inputs. The purpose of the study was to investigate how COVID19 pandemic has affected agriculture and food security in Uganda. The study used a descriptive design with only
quantitative approaches and the data used in this study was extracted from Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS). The
analysis involved running Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), pairwise correlation matrix and descriptive analysis.
Results indicated that there was a significant mean difference between prices of rice, sugar, milk and eggs from March
to June during the COVID-19 (P-value< 0.05), the actual percentage mean difference between prices of agricultural
products during COVID period at 5% level, it also discovered that between March and June, price of rice recorded
the highest increase with an average of 4.8%, followed by that of eggs (3.5%), Sugar (3.4%) while price of milk
recorded an average decline of negative 6.1% during COVID period. Results further exposed that transportation costs
had a negative and insignificant relationship with the prices of agricultural products during the COVID period (r=-
0.734, P-value>0.05). It is observed that after the outbreak of COVID-19, the transportation cost declined
exponentially to negative 0.6%, 0.7%, and 0.4 in March, April, and May respectively which was far below the
transportation costs recorded in 2019 and the price of rice persistently increased from 0.3% to 8% respectively due
to its increased household demand during the lockdown. Therefore, it is concluded that since the prices of core
agricultural food stuffs increased during the COVID-19 period, this affected the availability of food in homes, thus
reduced on food security.