Three Neighbors to Join Agricultural Group
AllAfrica -- October 3, 2012 -- Tanzania is to accept three neighbouring countries of Malawi, Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT).The Chairman of the SAGCOT Centre, Mr Salum Shamte revealed this during the just concluded Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) that the corridor would expand and include the three countries, a move that will expand farmers' access to markets among other things.
He said during a discussion on 'Agricultural Growth Corridors as platforms for transformative partnerships'. The Executive Director for Beira Agricultural corridor Mr Emerson Zhou said landlocked countries joining corridors would be a big boost to them.
The move was welcomed by Malawi's National Smallholder Farmers' Association, Chief Executive Officer Mr Dyborn Chibonga, who told the 'Business Standard' that they 'urgently' need the SAGCOT corridor to cut down on the costs of transportation of farm produce from the current 60 per cent of whatever they export or import.
"Malawi is a land locked country. So we need the corridor. Malawi can import more and export more but the challenge is transportation," he said. He said 40 to 60 per cent of anything imported or exported is transport costs. Agriculture forms the backborne of Malawi's economy.
"So the SAGCOT corridor will reduce that," he said. He said there was the Green Belt Irrigation, which has just started in Malawi and would benefit from SAGCOT. He said this is the motivation for this country's green belt concept. It is strengthened by painful memories of the severe drought beginning in early 2002, which triggered three years of hunger.
By 2005, five million people were affected by famine, all while large quantities of water flowed out of the country to the oceans of the world, he lamented. The plan is to protect the gains in food security, reduce vulnerability to drought and to boost production still further by irrigating a million hectares in a swathe of land lying within 20 kilometres of the country's three lakes and 13 perennial rivers.
On the opportunities of including the countries in the corridor, Mr Shamte said that the SAGCOT corridor has 7.5m hectares yet only has 2.5m hectares are under agriculture. He said Tanzania has 77 per cent of the people engaged in agriculture, of which 97 per cent are small holder farmers. "You can not speak of transforming agriculture without touching them. Anyone who is in business wants to grow.
No one wants to remain small," he said. He said there is going to be a transformation or movement for agriculture where the more it grows, the more people would move from the sector to other growing service sectors. "The farms will grow larger and we are going to see even larger farmers.
This is the way to go. The minimum size for a small holder farmer to make a difference is where a farm is about 15 hectares," he said. "So we shall not displace anybody. We will have small holder farmers in the corridor and make them expand," he said. As a means to ensure food security and income generation for smallholder farmers, the government put in place a backup action plan to achieve the objectives of Kilimo Kwanza, with the SAGCOT initiative.
The SAGCOT initiative was born out of the deliberations of the World Economic Forum on Africa held in May 2010 in Dar es Salaam, so as to bolster government efforts and other stakeholders seeking to bring about a green revolution in Africa. President Jakaya Kikwete believes the new strategy will properly anchor and underscore the involvement and the critical importance of the private sector to participate actively in agricultural production, provision of agricultural inputs, crop marketing and in the agricultural value addition chain.
The SAGCOT initiative is a public-private partnership placed to achieve the objectives of Kilimo Kwanza from the coastal plains and the valleys of Kilombero and Ruaha, to the hills and valleys of the Southern Highlands and the Usangu flats. Explaining to delegates at the AGRF forum, President Kikwete said that when he came into office in 2005, his government completed the design of the Agriculture Sector Development Strategy (ASDS) and its action plan for a green revolution in Tanzania.
The objective, he said, was to take bold actions to enable Tanzania to realise its aspirations of modernised and highly productive agriculture. "This was the reason for bringing up a new strategy called Kilimo Kwanza in 2009 to take care of some noticed weaknesses, and now SAGCOT is in place," he said.
Copyright Tanzania Daily News. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
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