Milk sellers in Buwekula county, Mubende district, have been given six months ultimatum by the Dairy Development Authority (DDA) to get better storage facilities for the milk they sell to the people because currently most of them are of substandard quality, which is why the milk easily gets spoiled even before reaching consumer consumption.

This comes after the DDA recently visited Mubende district and found various places that sell milk with poor storage apparatus, which has led to a massive decline in the quality of milk in the district.

According to the DDA, milk sellers in Mubende district have been warned before, but unfortunately, they do not want to follow the rules set by the authority.

‘’If after the six months they have not done what we have asked them to do, the big-headed culprits will be brought to book and fined too,’’ the DDA authorities said.

During an interview with journalists on May 10, 2024, in Mubende, Engineer Innocent Sekiziyivu, the Mubende Municipality Mayor, revealed that the operations they carried out in the district with authorities from the Dairy Development Authority showed that the milk sellers’ storage facilities are in bad shape and nonfunctional, hence the reason they sell spoilt milk to consumers, which is making them sick.

Eng. Sekiziyivu added that most of the refrigerators were non-functional, sanitation outside and inside the places was lacking, and most storage cans and refrigerators were smelling and dirty.

‘’I am very happy that the authorities from DDA have intervened in this issue because we, as district leaders, did intervene, but whenever we did, the milk sellers would fight us and say we wanted to extort them, which was not the case,’’ Sekiziyivu revealed.

Sekiziyivu further urged the milk sellers to abide by the rules set by the DDA in order to improve the quality of milk and to avoid being punished by the law if they do not follow the rules.

There have been trade disputes between Uganda and Kenya from 2019–2020 and 2023, whereby Kenya imposed a ban on Uganda’s milk, costing the country over UGX 100 billion in revenue due to allegations that Ugandan milk was not supplied by farmers but was instead imported in powdered form from other nations and reformed to be sold as fresh milk.

Currently, Kenya allows around 200 million litres of milk from Uganda annually, a figure that dropped even further following the recent restrictions on Brookside, so there is a possibility that Kenya will impose another ban on Uganda’s milk products again.