Long-awaited rains have started to fall in the south of Uganda -- one of Africa's top coffee producers -- and state-owned media urged farmers on Saturday to start planting crops immediately, Reuters reported. Uganda has escaped the worst of months of drought that have ravaged east Africa and seen levels in Lake Victoria drop to 80-year lows. Eastern districts around Mount Elgon on the Kenyan border, where its best Arabica beans are the grown, are likely to receive above average rainfalls, the New Vision newspaper said, citing government meteorological officials. But it cautioned that a broad swathe in the west known as Uganda's "cattle corridor" would get less rain than hoped for. The rolling hill country, which stretches from the Rwanda-Tanzania border in the south to Lake Kyoga in the north, had thunderstorms this week marking the beginning of steady rains. But officials cautioned that the downpours would peak in April, before tailing off in late May or early June. "We expect the farmers in the cattle corridor districts to plant faster maturing crops immediately," weather expert Samuel Senkunda told the paper. Seasonal rains in the north and northeast were expected to start next month, he added. Uganda's climate has become hotter and its rains more erratic in the last decade, researchers and the government say. Glaciers in the Rwenzori Mountains spanning the border with Democratic Republic of Congo are in "terminal decline" and have shrunk to 40 percent of their recorded size in 1955, and less than a quarter their size in 1906, scientists say. Like the snow on Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro, they are predicted to disappear completely in the next three decades. Investors say warmer weather poses a growing threat to coffee, which is Uganda's top export earner with revenues of $162 million for the 2004-2005 season. A rise in temperature of just two degrees Celsius would slash growing areas, and only the cooler Rwenzoris, hilly southwest and Mount Elgon areas would remain viable, researchers say. Other key economic crops like tea and cotton are also vulnerable to climate change, while the fall in Lake Victoria is threatening a thriving fish export industry.
