One of the core aspects of this strategy is to support processes that further advancement of farmer rights. This builds into our core belief that the capacity of small holder farmers to deal effectively with external stresses and opportunities, and to manage risk and vulnerability, including adaptation to climate change, under conditions of extreme asset constraints depends on their singular and collective action to defend their rights and to make choices in the face of new power structures and powerful external agendas. One of the challenging rights issue for farmers is how to deal with defence for the major assets that underpin their very livelihood – land. This is in the face ofcurrent unpredictable policies and laws that govern land amidst push for public and private capital to acquire land for greenfield investments like oil pipepileine and refinery, large scale agricultural lands, real estate development, factories among other things. How will multitudes of smallholder farmers with no land tittles nor information on how to acquire themdefends their fort? Only 18 percent of land in Uganda is titled.At AfT, we believe that for individuals and households, asset ownership and especially land translates to a secure place to live, means to earn a livelihood, and the ability to mitigate the economic and social risks associated with natural dis-asters, disease, and economic shocks. Therefore, AfT will beyond dissemination of information to stimulate farmer awareness and responsiveness to land rights – help build linkages for farmers under threat to opportunities for public interest legal representation, rights defenders, mobilise media (including new media) attention to their plight. AfT will also build re-inforncing partnerships with State and non-State actors involved in land affairs and build and document an atlas of land rights abuse hotspots. Beyond land rights, the Agency shall invest in mapping, teasing out, advocating and acting on broader farmer rights following the agriculture valuechain approach – from inputs markets (seed, breed markets), production and outputs markets. Along this chain, farmers face monumental challenges that inhibit them to defend their rights at every level of the chain. For instance farmers routinely purchase fake inputs with no recourse for justice, women and youth have no guaranteed user and ownership rights on land as a major factor of production, the marketplace is dominated by a cartel of price givers where farmers remain price takers – specifically for coffee, farmers in Uganda don’t participate in determining price of their produce.
