Attracting investors into agriculture is still a big challenge, the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC) has admitted.

The exercise is bottlenecked by the existing land laws, lack of agricultural financing schemes and the poor state of the country's rural infrastructure, the TIC executive director, Mr Emmanuel Ole Naiko said in Dar es Salaam recently.

"Despite having 44 million hectares of arable land, the problem of obtaining land for investment purposes still exists," Mr Ole Naiko said in his paper presented at the Annual Engineers' Day recently.

The Village Land Act No. 5 of 1999 makes it hard to create a Land Bank that is put aside for investment purposes.

The act, he said, requires investors to conduct several meetings with villagers. The meetings are to be followed by a process to move the land from village to general land. "It is only general land that can be accessible to investors and many see this process as cumbersome," he said.

For a long time, said Mr Ole Naiko, the sector has lacked long term financing while irrigation potentials remain hugely untapped not only in Tanzania but also in many other Sub Saharan African countries.

While Tanzania has been trying hard to develop its infrastructure with locally-sourced funds and with help from Japan and the Millenium Challenge Account, the country's hugeness makes it difficult for the massive investments in infrastructure to reach every corner.

Things are worsened by the lack of farms to act as pioneers of modern farms. These farms, he said, were supposed to be run by agricultural experts for farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs to emulate.

As a result, TIC data indicate that Tanzania attracted $744 million of foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in 2008, out which, only 11 per cent of it went to agriculture.

These factors, he said, result into low productivity. "While the yield per hectare for a crop of cotton in Tanzania is between 300 to 625 kilograms, a farmer in Zimbabwe, Mali, Brazil and Israel yield 850, 1220, 2865 and 3860 kilograms respectively," he said.