Diversification of agriculture crucial

BY EDITOR

23rd December 2013

Editorial Cartoon

 Revamping and modernising our agriculture by engaging higher levels of mechanisation, greater use of better seeds and other inputs as well as lending a keener ear to extension staff doubtless pays.

Indeed, that is part of the thrust of the much-touted national agricultural initiative popularly known as ‘Kilimo Kwanza’, literally suggesting that Tanzania has decided to treat the development of agriculture as its Number One priority.
This is much in the same spirit as we, as a nation, once decided to promote the sector into “the backbone of the country’s social and economic development” and “a matter of life and death” for our people.

But despite the overwhelming optimism resulting from the backing political and other pronouncements promised agriculture, most players in the sector are still engaged in subsistence farming, small-time fishing, livestock keeping with few benefits, etc.

It is no exaggeration to say that, for most members of the farming, fishing and livestock keeping communities, there is as precious little science and technology in their activities as there has always been.

We clearly ought to address this situation as a matter of urgency, this time around while we are at an advantage in that the country now boasts bigger numbers of experts in all the respective sub-sectors than at any other point in time in our history.

We should also meanwhile seek to reap the benefits of diversification instead of continuing to heavily depend on traditional cash and food crops even as changes in the weather have long dictated that we change tack.

Tanzania is no stranger to diversification in agriculture. At one time, Zanzibar discovered that it would head for economic disaster if it continued to rely almost solely on clove farming – when world prices proved horrendously erratic and competition with producers in other parts of the world became especially cut-throat.

In their wisdom, the Isles’ political and other leaders decided to preach the “gospel” of diversification in earnest, vigorously touting the farming of “minor” crops such as pepper, paprika and various other greens as well as such other spices as cardamom and cinnamon.

Whatever the degree to which the intervention made an impact in terms of economic gains and improvement in the lives of Zanzibar farmers and their dependants, it was lots better than doing nothing about the precarious circumstances then facing the people.

That was decades ago, but the need for us to disabuse ourselves of the belief that our agriculture of old will help us weather the economic and other storms we are bound to encounter from time to time remains as valid and relevant today as it ever was.

This is reason enough to heed the expert advice of the likes of International Institute of Tropical Agriculture on the importance of such little-valued crops as cowpeas, soybeans, yams and tubers, all of which commonly boost food security in countries threatened with famine.

Fortunately, the government is on record as having just declared that Tanzania boasts weather as conducive for olive farming as obtains in globally recognised olive production giants like Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia.
With all this, why shouldn’t diversification of our agriculture work miracles? We must wake up and do the needful.

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN