Uganda’s agricultural policy evolution between 1975 and 2009 offers a natural experiment in how post-conflict, liberalising economies
attempt to transform a subsistence-dominated sector into an engine of broad-based growth. Merging archival policy documents, five
national household surveys and district-level production data, this paper reconstructs the sequence of reforms—from the 1975–80
state grain monopolies, through the structural-adjustment divestiture of the 1990s, to the 2001–09 Plan for Modernisation of
Agriculture (PMA) and its district-level NAADS extension reforms. A synthetic-control difference-in-difference strategy shows that
liberalisation raised export crop revenue per rural capita by 18 % relative to a synthetic Uganda, but yields of food staples stagnated

and income inequality widened within the rural sector. Institutional analysis reveals that the PMA’s demand-driven extension model
increased technology uptake among the top tercile of farmers yet failed to reach female-headed households and the poor; average
extension contact fell from 1.3 to 0.7 visits per farmer between 2005 and 2008 as fiscal space contracted. Meanwhile, real public
agricultural spending per farmer declined 38 % over 1995–2005, while input markets remained thin: only 4 % of maize farmers
accessed improved seed by 2008. The study identifies three durable constraints—(i) political economy incentives that privilege short-
term export taxes over long-term productivity investment, (ii) a fiscal architecture that channels donor funds through parallel project
units, fragmenting service delivery, and (iii) land tenure insecurity that suppresses long-term on-farm investment. Looking forward,
scenario analysis indicates that closing the yield gap for key staples to regional frontier levels could lift 1.9 million Ugandans out of
poverty by 2030, but requires reallocating at least 6 % of the national budget to agriculture, integrating input subsidy vouchers with
targeted extension, and legislating a tradable land-use certificate to crowd in private irrigation finance. The paper concludes that
without embedded political bargains that prioritise smallholder productivity over revenue extraction, future flagship programmes risk
repeating the stop-go cycle that has characterised Ugandan agricultural policy for four decades.