Masindi, Uganda – Tobacco agriculture in Uganda has posed the risk of loss of the dietary key key for chimpanzees and baboons, increased main human interactions, and the spillover of disease.
Less than 0.5 km from Aliyo Salil’s tobacco farm, the wild frontier of Budongo Forest rises, a wall of untouched vegetation that marks the border with the emerald canopy.
At each dawn, Aliyo awakens to a natural orchestra. Birds chirping, chimpanzees sprinting through trees, and baboons barking commands – a soundtrack that registers as either annoying or entertaining in his daily life.
However, the balance of the forest has changed. Chimpanzees and baboons regularly emerge from lush areas, raiding the land of Aliyo, devouring crops and fruits, and trampling on fragile tobacco seedlings under their hands and feet, sometimes curious burr.
When these wild neighbors appear, Aliyo screams and shakes sturdy sticks to regain his territory.
“I know these animals can spread the disease, so I’m trying to avoid touching them,” he says.
These unnecessary visits are not random.
More than a decade ago, in response to the growing demand for tobacco, local farmers stripped off the Budongo forests of Raffia Falinifera palm trees, hardened the strings, eliminating the important sources of minerals essential to the primate diet.
This ecological confusion has led primates to consume bat feces. This contains many viruses for viruses, including those related to SARS, the coronavirus family that produced covid-19, according to a 2024 study published in nature.
This seemingly harmless dietary change has created what experts now recognize as a potential pathway for catastrophic bat viruses to jump from wildlife to human populations, setting a stage for a catastrophic ripple event shortly after Covid-19 defeated life around the world.
A vast army of viruses quietly circulates through the animal world, sometimes violating interspecies biological barriers, penetrating the human body and causing disease. Fatal outbreaks throughout history, including the plague, Spanish influenza and Covid-19, began in animals before spreading to humans. Scientists call this zoonotic disease.
Uganda stands at a specific crossroads in the vulnerability of the virus, often fighting the outbreak of Marburg, MPOX and Ebola. Recently, the country has been tackling the Ebola outbreak that began in January.
At present, despite no clear indication of danger to the potential for animal and human habitation around Budongo forests, Uganda needs to be prepared, said Dr. Deogratias Sekimpi, public health expert and technical advisor to the Uganda National Community and Occupational Health Association, a local non-governmental organization.
“Early detection is a real challenge,” says Henry Kyobe Bubosa, who helped manage Uganda’s response to the Covid-19, MPox and Ebola Sudan outbreak, and is the incident commander for the Ministry of Health. “What’s easier is that when an occurrence is declared, the rest of the other reaction mechanisms become active and quickly introduced.”
In this forest, humans and wildlife share the same resources on a daily basis, creating pathogens that allow pathogens to cross species barriers.
“People come to retrieve water from ponds in the forest. Animals are the very source of water that gets water from,” says Simon Peter Ogola, forest ecologist and research training coordinator for the Budongo Conservation Field Station.
While scientists have well documented new disease triggers such as deforestation, hunting, urbanization, climate change and industrial agriculture, how these activities create pathways to jump across species is not necessarily clear. The exact biological chain reaction may remain hidden in ecological blind spots.
At Budongo, nature studies reveal clear chains. The demand for tobacco led to deforestation and forced changes in the primate diet.
And while Uganda’s tobacco agriculture fell after the 2015 Tobacco Control Act, production has skyrocketed recently, with forecasts of 32,965 metric tons in 2023 and 35,600 metric tons by 2028.
There are an estimated 75,000 tobacco farmers in Uganda. In 2023, Uganda exported US$67.9 million of raw cigarettes, becoming the country’s 10th most exported product, according to data from the Economic Complexity Observatory.
Adult Benon represents a new wave of tobacco farmers that began in 2023. To cure the harvest, he occasionally collects wood from the forest, but buys strings from the community.
Over the years, tobacco has been more profitable for farmers than corn, says Adore.
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Like many locals, adults routinely enter the forest for domestic water and fire, while forest animals, especially chimpanzees, visit human settlements with each other. “Sometimes I see them in the woods. Sometimes they’ll eat mangoes that are on the trees in my house,” he says.
A 2015 survey found that major changes in land use in Budongo and Bugoma forest reserves have shifted the relationship between communities and chimpanzees, from coexistence to conflict. As trees disappeared from the forest, encounters between people and chimpanzees increased.
“This relationship is characterized by conflict, especially when chimpanzees and baboons venture across forest boundaries to compete with their children for mangoes, bananas and jackfruit,” says Ogora. “We record around 10 attacks each year, and chimpanzees are primarily targeted at children under the age of 10.”
Naxanze in Segawa is a Global Press Journal Reporter-in-Residence based in Kampala, Uganda.
Micheal Ezati Nyakafunjo translated interviews from Lugbara and Swahili.
