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Tanzania: Agriculture Needs Foreign Investment
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The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
EDITORIAL
8 May 2008
Posted to the web 8 May 2008
There is still no decisive, immediate action on mobilization of investments in mechanized food crops farming in the country by the government.
Politicians still talk about how great it would be for Tanzania to mobilize investments in agriculture.
This happens even as food prices keep on increasing in the local and global markets.
Information from the Tanzania Investment Centre shows it is still a long way to go before we see viable results.
Not only is the sector still lagging behind in the number and value of investments, but there also seems to be no alertness in ensuring investments in the sector are hastily mobilized.
We should realize that the looming food crisis is a hard reality that will surely knock us the hard way out of our slumber unless something is done immediately.
We should not forget that Tanzania is not yet self-sufficient in food and depends on imports season after season.
The land bank that authorities hoped could help boost investments in the sector has not officially kicked off, more than three years since TIC started working on it.
Its operations, according to TIC, awaits donor funding.
One of the reasons why Tanzania had failed to attract large scale investments in agriculture after liberalization of the economy was the controversial and investments unfriendly land laws.
Major amendments made in 1999 still failed to convince investors that their agriculture investments would be secure.
Some hapless white farmers kicked out of Zimbabwe some years ago wanted to invest in the country but failed.
There is need to revise investor unfriendly land policies and legislation to facilitate mechanized farming in the idle, unoccupied arable land as rightly pointed out by Premier Mizengo Pinda when adjourning Parliament in Dodoma last month.
More than 30 million hectares of fertile arable land is idle.
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It is useless to cling to ownership of land while living on empty stomachs.
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