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 By Samuel Kamndaya
The government needs to go an extra mile to help farmers benefit from the East African Common Market (EAC-CM), farmers say.
Tanzania is the largest country in East Africa. With the surface area of 945,203 square kilometres, the country has 44 million hectares of arable land. But only about 5.1 million ha, which is only about 5 per cent of surface area of Tanzania is cultivated annually. Farmers say the abundant arable land gives the country a comparative advantage in the production of crops to feed the entire region of over 120 million people.
But this is not without caution. Farmers who are members of the Mviwata (a network of farmers’ groups in Tanzania), say the government’s seriousness should be manifested in how it facilitates cross border trade. The network has 70,000 members countrywide.
The facilitation, they said, should involve the complete removal of a ban on exports of food crops.
“In my view, Tanzania, being the largest country in the region, has everything it needs to feed the entire bloc ….however, that will depend on how serious the government is when it says it has removed all the obstacles to cross-border trade in food crops,” says Mr Medadi Msenga, a Rukwa-based farmer.
Rukwa came into the public limelight in March this year, when it was reported that more than one million tonnes of food crops in the region risked rotting following the government decision to ban the export of cereals to avert food shortage in the country.
It was reported that the stocks were part of 1.6 million tonnes of food crops harvested in the Rukwa Region during the 2009/2010 crop season, of which only 250,000 tonnes were kept aside farmers’ own consumption.
A study, conducted in June, 2010, by Mviwata’s Mdachi Bakari and Gret’s Damien Lagandré and Thierry Lassalle, established that foreign buyers of food crops from Tanzania were frustrated by the ban.
“With the ban, buyers from Mombasa and Nairobi stopped coming to buy maize from Kibaigwa Maize market in Dodoma as they used to do before the ban,” said Mr Thierry Lassalle when presenting the study findings at a Mviwata symposium in Morogoro recently.
Apart from cementing the EAC-CM spirit, the removal of the ban could also help farmers to do business more profitably by selling their produce to other non-EAC-CM neighbours. This, they say, is in line with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules to which Tanzania is a signatory.
According to the study, it takes, for example, just two hours to reach a tar-marked road in Zambia from Igurusi Rice market in Mbeya and just one hour’s drive to reach a tar-marked road in Malawi. At the same time, it takes ten hours to reach Dar es Salaam.
“So you can see that the market is closer to borders, but far from consumers within Tanzania,” he said.
Nuisance taxes, poor infrastructure, high transportation costs and the number of licenses, required for one to transport food crops even from one region to the other, are also among the bottlenecks that need immediate redress, according to the study.
Rice has to be de-husked before it is transported to markets that are closer to farmers like Igurusi to Dar es Salaam. However, Igurusi Ward authorities charge a tax of Sh20 to de-husk one kilogramme of rice. Neighbouring wards charge Sh5 per kilogramme.
Traders, plying unofficial routes, spend Sh20 to transport one kilogramme of maize to Zambia from Matai Maize market in Rukwa. Consequently, it requires up to Sh100 to transport one kilogramme of maize from Rukwa to Dar es Salaam market.
Quoting from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates, Mr Lassalle said Burundi-based businesspeople are ready to buy massively from Rukwa, but transportion of crops is yet another nightmare.
“One needs a license even to transport maize from Rukwa to Kigoma....it is even more daunting to transport the produce from Kigoma to Burundi or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), whereby one is required to get a license that bears the signature from the regional commissioner’s office and from the Ministry of Agriculture Food Security and Cooperatives where will an ordinary farmer secure the RC’s signature?” enquired Mr Lassalle.
The government believes it is on the right track to allow Tanzanian farmers to rip the fruits of the EAC and even sell to non-EAC neighbours.
It has thus put in place a system whereby traders and farmers will export food crops without hurdles by utilising services of government officials in the Ministry of State in the Prime Minister Office (Regional Administration and Local Government).
“It is true that there have been a number of hurdles in the past...however, they have been sorted out....traders can now easily secure the licenses from PMO’s which has offices up to district levels....trade officers in the Ministry of Industries, Trade and Marketing, may also be consulted in the process,” said a principal trade officer in the Agriculture ministry, Ms Anne Frolence Bulonda.
She also warned traders to be on the watch out over some bureaucratic government officials who may be doing things that their bosses are not aware of.
On transportation of maize from Kigoma, across Lake Tanganyika to DRC and Burundi, Ms Bulonda said some Kigoma residents were to blame for their own failures.
“We have had cases whereby some Kigoma residents have proved to be working as agents of DRC-based businesspeople...they (Kigoma residents) receive millions of shillings so that they can buy cheaply from farmers....they also get the responsibility of transporting the produce up to DRC on pretext that the business is theirs only to help enrich DRC businesspeople who gives them peanuts after the job,” she insisted.
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