Julius Otom Moses owns eight mango trees, which bear fruit with abundance each spring. Moses and his family eat the fresh mangoes with relish but the rest are left to rot.
All over Katine the same thing happens every April and May, when, for about three weeks, there are mangoes everywhere falling from trees into the hands of grateful schoolchildren. Yet there are more than the people can eat and the remainder are not preserved or sold, so they simply lie on the ground and go to waste. A month later, those same people are hungry.
The unfulfilled potential of Katine's mango season is symptomatic of the problems the village faces in feeding itself. In an area traumatised by war, farming is at subsistence level and there is little experience in dealing with the wider market. These are the issues being tackled by Amref and its partner, Farm-Africa, in the Katine project, backed by donations from Observer and Guardian readers that are then matched by Barclays.
Moses, 34, estimates that his eight trees produce about 1,000 mangoes each. Between them, he, his wife and their four children eat about 70 a day for the month that they are in season. That still leaves him with around 6,000 mangoes wasted. "The rest of the mangoes rot," he said. "There is no market for them because everyone has them. People just eat them for free, but if there were a way of keeping them - maybe a fridge - they wouldn't be wasted."
Citrus farmer Eeru Egaja Selestine, 61, chairman of the local farmers' forum, adds: "They are eaten freely. Otherwise they are food for flies."
It is a problem that Amref is monitoring and keen to address. Its project officer, Venansio Tumuhaise, said: "Every spring you see the mangoes scattered in the village and next to the school, where children run to get them at lunchtime. But they cannot eat them all at once so they leave the others. The supply goes beyond the demand, then the season is over."
But Tumuhaise believes this illustrates Katine's current failure to market its produce to nearby villages and towns. "Mangoes are rotting here, but if you moved 20km out of Katine, you would find a place where mangoes are being bought. When we talked to some women here about it, they were shocked at the idea of going into the mango business. They thought mangoes were free: you eat what you can and let the others rot."
Amref examined the option of drying mangoes so they could be preserved, but concluded this would be unsustainable. A special processing unit would have to be bought and maintained, but would operate only for the month-long season, then lie idle for the rest of the year. But the Ugandan government is considering building a fruit-processing factory in the region.
Meanwhile, Amref is studying the possibility of gathering next season's mangoes to transport and sell in Soroti, a town half an hour's drive away. The high costs of fuel and transport could be avoided if the mangoes were loaded onto a truck that would be making the journey anyway.
The organisation also has to overcome cultural prejudices against a fruit that people here find difficult to regard as a valuable commodity. "It's not as valued as cattle or other crops," Tumuhaise added. "They take fruit at leisure - it's not regarded as a proper meal or a useful part of the diet. They say fruit is for children."
Helping farmers to commercialise their products and receive a fair price is a crucial part of Amref's work on livelihoods. At present many farmers work well away from one another with little ability to communicate. They are visited at their farms by middle men, who might warn them, truthfully or otherwise, that there is little demand for their crop, so they should sell at a low price.
Amref believes that its farmers' groups could be a blueprint for farmers to pool their resources, for example by putting crops into a central store that will preserve them until the market price is high. The groups could bargain collectively and share information. They are surely stronger together than apart.