Agago District will keep making headlines for hunger deaths as long as it keeps depending entirely on the sky for its harvest.

An Opinion

The Acholi Parliamentary Group has raised the alarm over a hunger crisis unfolding in Agago District, where a prolonged drought has been linked to a number of deaths this season.

Whatever the final, verified toll turns out to be, the underlying pattern is no longer in dispute: Agago’s Chief Administrative Officer has already written to the Office of the Prime Minister requesting emergency food relief, citing widespread crop losses from an extended dry spell.

Farmers across the district have publicly appealed for fast-maturing seed varieties after the prolonged sunshine wiped out maize and other food crops planted this season. This is not a rumour. It is a documented, escalating emergency, and it deserves a response that matches its scale.

But the response Agago needs is not the one it keeps receiving.

Every drought season in Northern Uganda follows the same script. Crops fail. Households run out of stock. Leaders write letters. Trucks of maize and beans eventually arrive, often late, often not enough, and always temporary. Within months, the cycle resets because the underlying vulnerability, total dependence on rainfall, was never addressed. Food aid saves lives in the moment it is delivered. It does nothing to prevent the next crisis from arriving on schedule.

This is the trap Agago is caught in, and it is a trap of policy, not of geography. Agago’s land is fertile. Its farmers are not lazy; they are, by every account from the ground, hardworking people doing everything within their means, planting early, trying drought-tolerant varieties, and adjusting to erratic rains. What they lack is not effort. What they lack is water they can control.

Uganda does not have a rainfall problem so much as it has a water management problem. Climate change has made the seasons in Acholi sub-region less predictable, a fact acknowledged by agricultural extension workers and NGO field staff working across Pader, Agago, Kitgum, and Lamwo, who now describe rainfall patterns that vary sharply even over short distances. Farmers can no longer plan a season around the calendar their grandparents used. In that environment, irrigation stops being a development luxury and becomes basic infrastructure, as essential as the road network or the power grid.

A district-level irrigation programme for Agago would do what emergency food aid structurally cannot:

• Break the cycle. Irrigated land does not wait on the sky. A farmer with reliable water can plant on schedule and harvest even when the rains fail.

• Protect the investment already made. Government has spent money on hand hoes, livestock restocking, the Parish Development Model and NUSAF I, II and III in this same district. Without water security, drought wipes out the returns on all of it, season after season.

• Turn a hardworking population into a food-secure one. Agago’s farmers have already proven their work ethic under the worst possible conditions. Give them water, and that same effort produces surplus instead of survival.

• Cost less over time than repeated emergency response. Relief convoys, seed replacement drives and disaster declarations are recurring costs with no lasting asset at the end. An irrigation scheme is a one time capital investment that keeps paying back every season it operates.

This is a direct appeal to the Ministry of Relief, Disaster Preparedness, and Refugees, alongside the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, and the Office of the Prime Minister: Agago’s emergency letters should not end with another delivery of maize and beans. They should trigger a feasibility assessment for irrigation infrastructure, valley tanks, solar-powered boreholes for smallholder schemes, or a formal extension of existing irrigation programmes already piloted elsewhere in Uganda, sited specifically for Agago’s sub-counties.

Local leadership already understands this. What is needed now is political will at the national level to treat irrigation as disaster prevention, not as a separate, lower-priority development ambition to be considered once the emergency has passed. By the time the emergency has passed, the next one has usually already begun.

Agago District will keep making headlines for hunger deaths as long as it keeps depending entirely on the sky for its harvest. The land is not the problem. The people are not the problem. The absence of water infrastructure is the problem, and it is the one part of this crisis that the government has the direct power to fix.

Food aid buys Agago another season. Irrigation buys it a future. It is time the government chose the latter.

Written by Otim Francis, the Founder and Lead Consultant of Yito Cam Agro TEC Solutions, a food and agribusiness consultancy based in Gulu City.