Right move on unlocking agro-industrial potential
In the year 2000, the Tanzania government of the day officially launched the Tanzania Development Vision 2025 (TDV 2025) with the overreaching development goal of attaining a semi-industrialised, middle-income competitive economy by 2025.
What with one thing leading to another, successor governments came up with the 2011/12—2015/26 Long-Term Perspective Plan (LTPP) which embodied Five-Year Development Plans (FYDPs).
The first such quinquennial Development Plan (FYDP I: 2011/12-2015/16) concentrated on “unleashing Tanzania’s economic growth potential.” The second one (FYDP II: 2016/17-2020/21) was about “nurturing an industrial economy” – while the third and current Development Plan (FYDP III: 2020/21-2025/26) focuses on a “competitiveness-led export growth”.
In summary whereof, the 25-year Long-Term Perspective Plan is some kind of a road map for ensuring that the country moves in the direction of realising TDV 2025 in the decade-and-a-half of implementation that remained.
One of the Development Vision goals was to enable the Industrial sector to grow from the current 7.0 percent to 8.2 percent per year – thereby increasing the manufacturing sector’s annual contribution to the national Economy from 9.3 percent to 18 percent by 2025.
Needless to belabour the point here, the reality on the ground is that, about a decade after the Long-Term Perspective Plan and associated Annual-cum-Quinquennial/Five-Year Development Plans started to be effectuated, the government is still not quite happy with the developmental performance as regards the ambitious but very noble TDV 2025 goals.
Structural transformation
Hence the real need from time to time to come up with functional, wide-ranging, far-reaching structural transformation, bolstered by such drivers as the Agricultural Sector Development Programme (ASDP), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (Sagcot) – and, now, the latest in the series: the Tanzania Agro-Industries Development Flagship (TAIDF). Formally launched in the nation’s capital Dodoma recently, TAIDF “is set to accelerate agro-industry-based all-inclusive socioeconomic development, characterised by local agro-processing for the domestic and export markets”.
To all intents and purposes, TAIDF – which is a framework strategy that was designed and developed under a public/private partnership process – is part of the implementation of the second phase of the Agricultural Sector Development Programme (ASDP II).
TAIDF is designed and intended to “catalyse earlier and current programmes and efforts in agro-industrialisation by providing a coherent framework for coordinating implementers, as well as resources mobilisation in support of the development of agro-industries across Tanzania”.
How well-intentioned; how timely, we say.
This is especially taking into account the fact that, for far too long Tanzania has been exporting agricultural goods mostly in the raw form. These are processed into finished products abroad – and some of which we then import at great cost to Tanzania in scarce foreign exchange.
The bottom line here is that Tanzania not only exports industrial inputs at throw-away prices, but also exports jobs which should otherwise benefit our hordes of jobless youth and other disadvantaged segments in Society who should otherwise be manning home industries that should have been established to process our local produce.
Let TAIDF be the key which Tanzania needed to unlock its immense and yet-to-be-fully-tapped agro-industrialisation potential.
