AGRA VISIT TO TANZANIA TO ENHANCE FOOD SECURITY AND AGRICULTURE INCOME
The Alliance for a Green Revolution
in Africa (AGRA) President, Dr. Agnes Kalibata, has recently visited Tanzania
to review progress on the small-scale farmers and smallholders’ grain storage
project undertook in 2014 and to launch a new 5-year business plan to enhance
food security and farmers’ income.
The visit follows an announcement by AGRA’s
Tanzania Country Head, Dr. Mary Mgonja, whom explained that Dr. Kalibata’s
visit to Tanzania aimed at empowering small-scale farmers and smallholders to
ensure the country and continent’s food security while using agriculture as a
driver of regional economic growth. AGRA is delighted with the progress made by
Tanzania on improving the post-harvest losses and grain storage by the usage of
innovative technologies as hermetic cocoons, metal silos and Purdue Improved
Cowpeas (PICs) bags, explained Dr. Mgonja.
These three technologies have helped
to keep high levels of harvest on key food crops benefiting 4,200 farmers in
Ruvuma, Singida, Mbeya, Njombe, Dodoma, and Babati regions avoiding
post-harvest losses of up to 40%, Dr. Mgonja added. According to AGRA, the
three technologies were part of a two-year project that sought to end with the
post-harvest losses in Tanzania after a better application of practices by
small-scale farmers and smallholders drove to a harvest surplus of 14.38
million metric tonnes of crops in 2013.
This situation yields to the necessity of not
only improved storage facilities to reduce post-harvest losses but also to
raise capacity storage. This is why the government plans to raise the National
Food Reserve Agency (NFRA) capacity storage from the current 450,000 tonnes to
750,000 tonnes by 2017 to ensure that agriculture is a sustainable market for
farmers’ crops according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and
Cooperatives.
Tanzania has already improved its storage
facilities and raised capacity in the last two years, however, the country
still experiences a harvest surplus of 3 million metric tonnes of which 1
million is from maize and around 795,000 from rice.
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