Enhancing the resilience of Tanzania’s communities

By Alice Musetti

In sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of the population are smallholders, and they feed roughly one billion people of Africa’s people. Ironically, these communities are also some of the most susceptible to food insecurity, malnutrition, and climate change. These problems form a vicious cycle between smallholder agriculture, rural poverty, and climate vulnerability, as has become evident in our country lately. Breaking the chain requires us to build smallholder resilience through training, financial support, and access to alternative markets, including climate markets.

The impact of climate change is more severe than just reduced food production; changing weather and climate patterns could affect a significant portion of our GDP – up to 30 percent, according to President Samia Suluhu. At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow, Scotland, President Suluhu said, “We know what is required and we know if the world does not act accordingly, countries like ours with lower adaptive capacity have no option but to brace for more devastating impacts. Our pride, Mount Kilimanjaro, is becoming bald due to glaciers melting. Our beautiful archipelago, Zanzibar, is struggling with temperature rises, saltwater intrusion, and inundation, impacting its tourism ecology. What does all this mean to a country like Tanzania? It means 30 percent of our GDP (gross domestic product) from agriculture, forestry, and fisheries is not sustainable.”

With each change in climate and the environment, farmers have often been encouraged to tackle the challenges that variability brings. Still, there is a need for a new degree of environmental adaptation and reset. What can we do?

We can step up work to increase farmer resilience, especially for smallholders who depend on rain-fed agriculture. We can achieve this through innovative farming practices such as crop diversification, intensive land use to increase productivity on already available land, and reducing deforestation.

Crop diversification can improve resilience in a variety of ways: it creates a greater ability to suppress pest and disease outbreaks and transmission, and safeguards production from the effects of climate variability. It also allows farmers to spread production and economic risk over a broader range of crops, reducing financial risks associated with bad weather or market shocks.

Another way we can help reset the environment is by practicing sustainable intensive farming. This is production that meets the agricultural sustainability criteria of enhanced production, ecological health, economic profitability, resource equity, and quality livelihoods.

Our experience at One Acre Fund, an agricultural development company that served over 105,000 Tanzanian farmers in 2021, is that production increases remarkably when farmers adopt standardised production technology and processes. By encouraging modest use of inorganic fertiliser, we have found that the carbon sequestration from increased biomass (due to more robust plant growth) outweighs the emissions associated with fertiliser application. To achieve this, farmers can practice microdosing – applying small quantities of fertiliser close to the seed or plant and deep placement. We also encourage organic amendments, usually by communicating the importance of using organic compost or manure in conjunction with inorganic fertilisers, which is critical for long-term soil health.

Practices like these build on climate-smart agriculture, an integrated approach to managing crop, livestock, and agroforestry landscapes by addressing the interlinked challenges of food production and a changing climate. Climate-smart agriculture aims to increase productivity, improve nutrition and boost incomes, enhance farmer resilience by reducing vulnerability to drought, pests, diseases, and other climate-related shocks, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

An important part of reducing greenhouse gas pollution involves identifying ways to absorb excess carbon out of the atmosphere. As one of the biggest carbon sinks, the effectiveness of trees in sequestering atmospheric carbon is remarkable, which is why they make so much business sense. One Acre Fund is running a carbon credit trial in Iringa this year as we look to create revenue streams that add to farmers’ income beyond their increased crop yields.

By paying farmers for their service to the ecosystem, we can encourage tree planting across the country. By combining tree planting with crop production – through planting crop-friendly trees that are also an investment in the long term – farmers can be assured of their livelihoods while catering to climate and environmental conservation needs.

As we look to the future, we must keep empowering farmers to adopt innovations and climate-smart practices that build their resilience against rural poverty and climate change.

Alice Musetti is the external Relations manager at One Acre Fund -Tanzania