Negotiating with tomorrow, Tanzania today

IN 2022, I penned the article below on this same platform. After reviewing it, I found that there are still many relevant issues that deserve wider discussion today.

Please read: Humanely speaking, there is no tomorrow that is less dreadful, more predictable or assuredly kind.

As long as it is not here, one can be forgiven for freaking out and panicking about it.

But then there is a platform from which we learn that unless something is done, the said virtues are highly anticipated to happen, however horrific they might be.

And here we are, trying to turn our focus towards tomorrow, what it stands to be and what it can be made to be.

Slowly, as Tanzanians, we are coming to a previously loathed agreement that food crop production goes well beyond subsistence purposes.

It has proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to be instrumental in generating personal and national income in a manner that can hardly be equated with non-food crops.

Generally, drawing from the trends of the past three decades, Tanzania is largely food secure.

The country has earned that tag and seems to have learned enough to make the present success stay.

The lingering question is whether we can afford to remain with the status quo feeding ourselves and exporting a little to the region and the world or stand at the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, see the glaring need for food across the planet and take it as our responsibility to feed it.

But, well, are we even near it? So, let’s talk about maize, the biggest crop in Tanzania in terms of quantity, the number of farmers engaged in its production and the area under cultivation.

The United Nations agency on trade data is even more telling. In the year under review, global trade in maize was valued at around 59 billion US dollars.

China, Japan, Iran and South Korea alone imported more than 65 million metric tonnes of maize, equivalent to about 19.4 billion US dollars.

Nearly all these countries have a lower dependence on agriculture than on the manufacturing sector, a revelation that should make agrarian economies such as Tanzania happy.

In that particular year, only 144 countries managed to supply 277 countries and territories around the world.

What is appalling is that Tanzania managed to produce a little more than 6.7 million metric tonnes of maize but exported only 544,228 tonnes.

ALSO READ: Free health services today, stronger Tanzania tomorrow

If informal cross-border trade is factored in, the estimate may not go beyond two million tonnes.

A drop in the ocean? Whichever way we look at it, Tanzania is not yet a significant player in global maize trade, a situation that probably begs the question of whether the status quo should be left as it is.

Digging deeper to understand the root cause of this “big problem”, we come to the realisation that yield is a serious inhibitor to the entire progress of maize production.

The Ministry of Agriculture reveals that maize productivity in the year under review, the ratio between quantity produced and cultivated area was 1.7 tonnes per hectare.

Yes, you read it correctly: 1.7 tonnes per hectare, up from 1.6 tonnes per hectare three years earlier.

In the Southern and East African regions, only three countries come into the limelight on maize production: Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa.

Nevertheless, the other two players, Zambia and South Africa, have higher yield levels than Tanzania, at three tonnes per hectare and 5.6 tonnes per hectare respectively.

Apparently, compared with her peers, Tanzania’s stellar performance over the years has largely been a result of expanding the cultivation area rather than improving productivity.

Data obtained from the Ministry in question shows that between 2019 and 2021, there was an increase of 297,756 hectares of land under maize cultivation, significant enough to contribute to an addition of more than one million tonnes of maize grain.

Now this brings us to the core of today’s discussion: Is technology the problem?

The question sounds logical because at least the top 10 leading maize exporters in the world, led by the United States of America, are global industrial powerhouses.

However, while we can, and probably should, be envious of South Africa, which took the 10th position among maize exporters in 2021, we should also be mindful of the fact that this impressive performance is partly attributed to the planting of genetically engineered seeds, which are not permitted in Tanzania and many other African countries.

This was meant to be a thought-provoking discussion rather than a closed-ended essay that comes up with all the answers. The biggest success this piece can pride itself on is when serious dialogue is born out of it.

The post Negotiating with tomorrow, Tanzania today appeared first on Daily News.