Land is not merely a factor of production in rural Uganda; it is the foundation on which household survival is built. A new cross-sectional study published in BMC Agriculture by Francis David Wabusa, Aisha Jjagwe Lutale, and Peter Gutwa Oino provides some of the most granular quantitative evidence to date that the way land is owned, inherited, and governed directly determines whether families in three Ugandan districts eat well or go hungry. Surveying 398 households across Mbale, Bukedea, and Luwero districts, the researchers found that 60.3 percent of households were food secure while 39.7 percent were not, and that the odds of food security swung dramatically depending on tenure arrangements, access to irrigation, exposure to pests, and the gender of the landowner. The findings arrive at a moment when roughly 38 percent of Ugandan households face moderate to severe food insecurity despite years of agricultural policy reform, making the study a pointed reminder that food policy is, in large part, land policy.
The research team deliberately chose three districts that span Uganda’s fragmented tenure landscape. Under the Land Act of 1998, amended in 2010, Uganda formally recognizes four tenure systems: freehold, leasehold, Mailo, and customary. Customary tenure dominates in Eastern Uganda, including Mbale and Bukedea, while Luwero in the central Buganda region hosts a mix of customary, freehold, and Mailo arrangements. Mbale, with a population of 410,300 across five rural sub-counties, is characterized by subsistence farming and widespread land fragmentation. Bukedea, with 112,213 rural residents spread across 14 sub-counties, experiences persistent tenure insecurity and recurrent environmental shocks. Luwero, located about 64 kilometers north of Kampala, has a population of 456,958, with 81 percent of households engaged in subsistence agriculture and only 21 percent living in urban areas. This diversity allowed the researchers to compare how different governance regimes translate into food outcomes within a single national context, an approach few studies have attempted.
Methodologically, the study was rigorous for a field survey. The sample size of 398 was calculated using Yamane’s formula applied to a target population of 51,046 individuals across the three districts, with a precision level of 0.05. Participants were adult farmers aged 18 and above who were responsible for household land use and agricultural decision-making. A multi-stage sampling strategy stratified sub-counties by geographic location and agricultural productivity, then randomly selected villages and systematically sampled households within them. Data were collected through a structured, expert-reviewed, and pretested questionnaire administered face-to-face by trained enumerators, with internal consistency assessed by Cronbach’s alpha at an acceptable value of 0.75. Analysis proceeded in three phases in Stata 18: univariate description, bivariate cross-tabulation with Pearson’s chi-square tests, and finally a binary logistic regression model reporting adjusted odds ratios with 95 percent confidence intervals, adjusted for confounders including household size, education level, and access to agricultural land.
The headline result is stark. Households with sufficient land for food production had roughly 22 times higher odds of being food secure than those without adequate land (adjusted odds ratio 22.08, 95 percent confidence interval 6.25 to 77.97). In the bivariate analysis, 96.2 percent of households reporting insufficient land were food insecure, compared with 61.7 percent food security among those with adequate land, a difference significant at p less than 0.001. How land was acquired mattered nearly as much as how much of it there was. Land inherited from family members conferred about 6.6 times higher odds of food security (AOR 6.62, 95 percent CI 1.12 to 39.18), while newly acquired land was associated with roughly fivefold higher odds (AOR 4.99, 95 percent CI 1.14 to 21.85). Inheritance, the authors note, typically comes with socially recognized claims that support continuity in land use and the intergenerational transfer of agricultural knowledge.
Two agronomic variables produced even larger effects than tenure itself. Access to irrigation was associated with about 27 times higher odds of food security (AOR 27.39, 95 percent CI 2.52 to 297.55), despite irrigation remaining rare across the study sites; only 16.2 percent of food-secure households reported irrigation access versus 3.2 percent of food-insecure ones. Adoption of farming technologies and risk management practices within the previous five years was reported by 39.6 percent of food-secure households but just 4.4 percent of food-insecure households, and it carried an adjusted odds ratio of 14.71 (95 percent CI 1.37 to 158.23). In a country where rainfall patterns are becoming increasingly erratic and prolonged dry spells more common, these numbers suggest that water control and technology adoption function as powerful protective factors against production failure, stabilizing yields and enabling year-round cultivation in ways that rain-fed subsistence farming cannot.
On the destructive side of the ledger, pest and disease outbreaks emerged as the single most damaging factor measured. Households affected by outbreaks, including infestations of Fall Armyworm, a caterpillar pest that devastates maize and other staples, had dramatically reduced odds of food security (AOR 0.01, 95 percent CI 0.00 to 0.11). In the bivariate analysis, only 55.5 percent of pest-affected households were food secure compared with 83.8 percent of unaffected households. The authors point to prior Ugandan research reporting that 64 percent of farmers in Kamuli and 82 percent in Namutumba regarded Fall Armyworm as a serious threat to production. The implication is urgent: integrated pest management, timely extension services, and access to resistant crop varieties are not optional extras but core components of any food security strategy in the region.
The tenure typology itself also shaped outcomes in ways consistent with economic theory. Households under freehold and customary systems were significantly more food secure than those under leasehold or Mailo arrangements. The authors attribute this to the greater perceived tenure security and autonomy over land use under freehold and customary regimes, which encourage long-term investment in soil conservation, irrigation infrastructure, and tree planting. Leasehold and Mailo systems, by contrast, are often characterized by unclear ownership rights, limited user control, and disputes that discourage investment in productivity-enhancing inputs. This aligns with a broader literature linking tenure insecurity to land degradation, reduced access to credit, and suboptimal land use, and with recent Ugandan evidence that tenure insecurity remains a binding constraint on productivity, particularly in Mailo-affected regions such as Luwero.
Land loss tells the mirror-image story. Among households reporting changes in land access, 44.7 percent of food-secure households had gained land, whereas 70.3 percent of food-insecure households reported losing it, a difference significant at p equal to 0.048. Land disputes were reported by 46.2 percent of food-insecure households compared with 33.3 percent of food-secure ones, and negative perceptions of the tenure system’s effect on food access were more prevalent among the food insecure (38.6 percent versus 25.0 percent, p equal to 0.005). In an agrarian economy, land is simultaneously the means of food production, a source of income, and a form of social identity; losing it through eviction, boundary conflict, or market displacement removes the productive base with little possibility of substitution. Notably, households reporting no conflicts with neighbors showed reduced odds of food insecurity (AOR 0.15, 95 percent CI 0.02 to 0.92), underscoring how local social relations mediate tenure security.
Perhaps the most sobering finding concerns gender. Female-headed households constituted only 10.6 percent of landowners in the sample, even though women are central to food production across the study region. Male-headed households dominated land ownership and were more likely to be food secure, a pattern the authors link to structural gender barriers that limit women’s access to and control over land. The study joins a growing body of work, from Ghana to Mozambique to Malawi, showing that gendered tenure access shapes food and nutrition security, particularly under urbanization pressure. The authors argue that addressing these inequities requires comprehensive strategies including joint land titling, legal empowerment, and the integration of women into land governance structures, rather than piecemeal interventions.
The study’s policy implications are concrete. The authors recommend reforming leasehold and Mailo tenures through legal harmonization and efficient land administration, scaling up the issuance of Certificates of Customary Ownership, facilitating joint titling, strengthening district-level dispute resolution, and improving legal literacy among land users. In parallel, they call for investment in small-scale irrigation infrastructure, integrated pest management, improved seeds, and climate-smart technologies, with extension services expanded especially in tenure-insecure regions. They also urge that land tenure reform be mainstreamed as a cross-cutting issue in Uganda’s National Development Plans. The authors acknowledge limitations: the cross-sectional design cannot establish causation, self-reported data may carry recall bias, purposive district selection limits national generalizability, and food security was measured as a composite rather than disaggregated into availability, access, utilization, and stability. Still, the core message stands out with unusual clarity. In rural Uganda, the path to resilient food systems runs directly through land governance, and a family’s dinner table is secured, or emptied, by the fine print of who holds the land and how surely they hold it.
Subject of Research: The impact of land tenure systems on household food security in rural Uganda
Article Title: Land tenure systems and their impact on food security in Mbale, Bukedea, and Luwero Districts, Uganda
Article References: Wabusa, F. D., Lutale, A. J., & Oino, P. G. (2025). Land tenure systems and their impact on food security in Mbale, Bukedea, and Luwero Districts, Uganda. BMC Agriculture, 1(1), Article 20. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44399-025-00018-6
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s44399-025-00018-6
Keywords: land tenure, food security, Uganda, customary tenure, Mailo tenure, irrigation, Fall Armyworm, land inheritance, gender equity, smallholder farming, land disputes, agricultural technology
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Alan Morgan. (October 1, 2026). Who Owns the Land Eats: Uganda Study Ties Tenure Security to Food Security. Scienmag. https://scienmag.com/who-owns-the-land-eats-uganda-study-ties-tenure-security-to-food-security/
Alan Morgan. “Who Owns the Land Eats: Uganda Study Ties Tenure Security to Food Security.” Scienmag, 1 October 2026, https://scienmag.com/who-owns-the-land-eats-uganda-study-ties-tenure-security-to-food-security/. Accessed 1 October 2026.
Alan Morgan. “Who Owns the Land Eats: Uganda Study Ties Tenure Security to Food Security.” Scienmag. October 1, 2026. https://scienmag.com/who-owns-the-land-eats-uganda-study-ties-tenure-security-to-food-security/
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Tags: agricultural technologycustomary tenurefall armywormfood insecurityFood securitygender and land rightsgender equityhousehold survivalirrigationirrigation accessland disputesland inheritanceLand ownershipland policy reformland tenureland tenure systemsMailo tenurepest exposurerural livelihoodssmallholder farmingUgandaUganda agriculture
