Master of Science in Global Change and Sustainable Agriculture

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), number 1 and 2, have everything to do with agriculture: poverty and hunger have to be halved by 2030. Projections for 2030 have shown hungrier people in Africa than in the early 1990s. Hundreds of millions of children are expected to be born over that period of time, and many of them may become new members of the hunger force. Today, tropical agriculture has been interpreted as food insecurity and hunger driven by land degradation, climate change and population pressure on land. This calls for sustainable land and water resources management to avert the negative trend in the tropics. Tens of millions of lives can be saved from hunger. Practical scientific solutions exist. Agriculture based on area expansion is always detrimental and cannot be designated sustainable unless the forgone ecosystem services are accounted for somehow. Sustainable agricultural development remains an elusive goal and incompletely understood concept by the current generation of agricultural scientists, particularly in many of the world's poorest regions where adoption is low. Low agricultural productivity continues to be a key factor in unsustainable production systems, despite decades of research on soil conservation, breeding and other sustainable practices. The challenge facing University training, researchers and policy analysts is to understand the processes causing low agricultural productivity and how to design mechanisms or a combination of technologies and practices that will provide farmers in developing countries with the economic incentives needed to adopt more sustainable land use and management practices. Many practising African agricultural scientists today have been trained in a single discipline approach, such as soil science, crop science, animal science or food science, and therefore lack a multi-disciplinary approach to address the problem of low agricultural, food insecurity and sustainable development intertwined in the moving target of hunger and increasing population. A graduate program in Global Change and Sustainable Agriculture (GSA) seeks to address the always incomplete concept of sustainable agriculture by generating a critical mass of world-class scientists that have practical intellectual and leadership capacity to offer solutions to the challenges of low agricultural productivity (including people, plants, animals, soil, water, and other resources), environmental health and poverty in the developing world. The programme focus is aligned with vision 2040 and NDPIII. Vision 2040 stresses Science, Technology, Engineering and Innovation (STEI) and industrialization. The NDPIII has its vision as “A Transformed Ugandan Society from a Peasant to a Modern and Prosperous Country within 30 years”. The program duration is two years comprising of two semesters of taught courses, followed by two semesters devoted to research work leading to a thesis. Students gain knowledge and experience in diverse discipline areas and holistic approaches necessary to understand and develop sustainable agriculture to support rural development, alleviate poverty and reach food security, especially in the developing world. The program focuses on multi-disciplinary teaching and research into five major systems: land, water, agriculture, climate and human dimension (society and economic development). The degree program focuses on investigating the internal operational challenges of these systems and the dynamics of their interaction at multiple scales to produce food. Solutions are proposed for their sustainable deployment, focusing on the conservation of; soil resources, biodiversity, and water, in the frame of combating land degradation and climate change. Experiments, participatory research, statistics and mathematical models are the primary investigative tool in our teaching and research to bridge natural and social sciences. The training also prepares one to be a hardworking, dedicated and self-reliant individual with the ability to work with diverse groups of people. In addition, the program cultivates written and verbal communication skills, which enable one to be self-motivated and fit in all walks of life