TANZANIA'S move to place agriculture at the top of the agenda is of paramount for the ongoing efforts toward the implementation of the Tanzania Agro-industries Development Flagship (TAIDF).
The recommendations were made by Policy Implementation Consultant Dr Barney Laseko in a paper titled, "Improving the Agriculture Business Enabling Environment: A Pre-requisite for Agro-Industrialisation in Tanzania."
He said TAIDF is a government framework for mobilising and coordinating investments toward agro-industrialisation, which was developed by the secretariat of the Agriculture Sector Development Programme (ASDP II) with technical and financial support provided by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
"Hastening implementation should be done through the urgent improvement of existing systemic governance hurdles in the Agricultural Business Enabling Environment (ABEE)," he said.
The implementation of TAIDF programme should include immediate policy intervention, for example, the provision of highly subsidised sunflower hybrid seeds to all farmers in the country for three consecutive years, which would have a proven revolutionary impact.
For TAIDF to succeed, the government, private sector, and their development partners must come together to accelerate the creation of the requisite Agricultural Business Enabling Environment in Tanzania.
In 2020, the government developed TAIDF with the goal of enhancing and accelerating structural economic transformation through improved sustainable agro-industry-based economic growth that is inclusive of the poor, women and youth.
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The paper calls for the use of the advantage presented by information and communication technology (ICT), and urges for the existing hurdles to be addressed through a 'Big Results Now' approach.
The key eighteen ABEE factors include governance of land, water, seed, fertilizer, mechanization, finance, transportation, markets, gender (with a special interest in youth), logistics, crop aggregation, storage, value addition, tax regime, farmer organizations, dialogue, ICT and the environment.
He said the paper cites the findings presented by National Sample Census of Agriculture (NSCA) 2019-2020 results which revealed that in Tanzania, 65.3 per cent of households' livelihood depends directly on agriculture for their wellbeing.
According to NSCA 2019/20 data, the major agricultural constraints reported by agriculture-based households included climate change impact (17.8 per cent), cost of inputs (15.6 per cent), access to land (13.5 per cent), low prices of agricultural produces (7.2 per cent), pests and diseases (6.7 per cent), availability of inputs (5.6 per cent) and soil fertility (5.3 per cent).
All of these constraints directly identified by farming households require targeted policy interventions
