Karamoja is hungry again. But the deeper question is not why people are hungry in 2026. It is why a bad season so often becomes something worse than a bad harvest: a humanitarian emergency.
The current IPC assessment estimates that 673,000 people, 42 percent of Karamoja’s population, face crisis-level food insecurity or worse between August and October 2026, including about 118,000 in emergency, while 679,000 are projected to remain in crisis or worse through February 2027. Karamoja is not classified as famine, despite these figures. That vulnerability is longstanding, marked by the 1980 famine, the 2011 East African drought and the 2022 hunger crisis that reportedly claimed more than 2,200 lives.
Understanding that crisis requires understanding what food means in Karamoja. Food is rooted in sorghum and cattle. Sorghum is the staple, ground into flour and cooked as atapa, eaten with bean sauce and wild greens, pumpkin or cowpea leaves. Cattle extend the food system beyond grain: milk is drunk fresh or fermented into sawa or lolon, while blood is drawn from living cattle through bloodletting, sometimes eaten raw and sometimes mixed with milk or food. After harvest, food is more plentiful and families eat more often; as stores diminish, meals become fewer, sometimes just one evening plate.
That system depends on water, crops, livestock and markets, but the balance can fail all at once. When rains fail, crops suffer and livestock face drought, disease and scarce water. Food prices rise as incomes fall, and families eat their reserves and sell productive assets. A bad season then quickly becomes a crisis beyond the harvest.
Yet Karamoja has not been without intervention. The government and partners have for years invested in boreholes, valley tanks and irrigation, including Lokitumo in Moroto. FOSTER, FAO and WFP have rehabilitated water systems while supporting school feeding and early action. Most recently, the President unveiled a long-term three-phase strategy: short term, sorghum, green gram and white peas suited to unreliable rains, alongside goats and beekeeping; then irrigation and dams; and eventually commercial agriculture.
If these investments have been this consistent, why does the same vulnerability keep returning? This is the agricultural policy question at its heart. Karamoja is not evidence that Uganda lacks agricultural potential. It shows that the country has not yet organised and financed that potential strongly enough to protect food security when one region suffers a bad season.
Feeding Uganda’s population must therefore be treated not simply as development policy, but as a matter of national security.
Just as the State finances defence in peacetime, agriculture needs planning and funding long before hunger strikes. Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy shows how this can work by supporting farmers, sustaining production and protecting food supplies. Uganda should build a system that moves surplus to deficit areas, stores grain between harvests and keeps food affordable when a season fails, rather than waiting for crisis to trigger action.
he answer also lies closer to home. Food security is shaped by who controls, accesses and consumes available food. Cattle are food, income and wealth, yet in Karamoja women have less involvement in livestock decisions even though they carry much of the work of feeding households. A family can have cattle, milk, meat, eggs and vegetables, yet women and children may still be denied eggs, offals or certain vegetables. Food taboos restrict pregnant mothers from eating ngamolteng (offals), ekiloton (wild dodo), nyito (animal testis) and emany (liver) because of beliefs linking them to miscarriage, madness, infertility or difficult childbirth. Harvests also bring social obligations. Marriages, initiations and naming ceremonies, some postponed through the lean months for lack of food, are celebrated with the new stores and can leave little reserve when another weather shock strikes.
The test of all these interventions, therefore, is not how much relief arrives after a crisis, but whether households can withstand failed rains without exhausting the means to recover. Bad seasons will always happen. In Karamoja, they should not have to become humanitarian emergencies.