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For a long time, the Ugandan vanilla industry has been plagued with challenges such as; theft of vanilla beans, loss of life due to theft, and harvesting premature beans. These challenges largely compromised the quality of Uganda’s vanilla beans and cost us important international markets.
VANEX in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture Animal Industry and Fisheries with technical and financial support from the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) vines project are working to ensure formulation and enacting of an appropriate regulatory framework for the vanilla industry. The past initiatives involved the formulation of district ordinances, of which Kasese district developed and enacted a Kasese District Ordinance. However, the challenges of the vanilla industry that call for a nationally regulated industry remain. This is especially so that vanilla is grown in more than 25 districts, making the development of ordinances that operate at the district level outpaced.
With the push for laws to regulate Uganda’s vanilla industry, we hope to ensure the sustainability of the industry and promote quality control of vanilla beans and processed products.
Challenges such as the theft of vanilla beans greatly affect farmers. We aim to lobby the government to take vanilla theft seriously and introduce more stringent laws and punishments against the culprits of vanilla theft.
Currently, the penal code has no law tackling vanilla bean theft which makes it difficult to penalize culprits.
