ABSTRACT

This chapter analyses efforts to address food security and recovery in post-conflict northern Uganda. This is achieved by exploring how local government actors, humanitarians and local communities try to build on recovery interventions and agricultural rehabilitation programming, and the consequences of their efforts for the food security of the local community. Its major focus is the shift from temporary relief to recovery (i.e., production, infrastructure and restarting basic services) amidst several challenges. The chapter shows that a convergence of multiple humanitarian aims, national development policies, and donor priorities presents a muddle that does not reflect the farmers’ own recovery processes and the constraints they face in bringing land back into cultivation in general. The role of sitting allowances is analysed as a way to create a modestly enabling environment combining and adapting these various norms to the local context.