Posted on September, 13, 2016 at 09:57 am
THE government should consider waiving taxes on some of post-harvest loss reducing equipments to make them more affordable to farmers which will boost efforts to cut food losses.
The equipments, including metal silos, hermetic cocoons, and polypropylene storage bags, are subjected to 18 per cent Value Added Tax which makes them expensive to farmers presenting a challenge in efforts to curb food waste and spoilage occurring across the value chain.
According to an Associate Director of The Rockefeller Foundation which supports farmers with the post-harvest loss reducing technologies, Betty Kibaara, the 18 per cent Value Added Tax on the post-harvest loss reducing solutions was one of the main challenge in efforts to support farmers with post-harvest food loss innovations in Tanzania.
“Right now, one of the challenge we have is that those bags are subjected to 18 per cent Value Added Tax which make them more expensive,”she told the ‘Daily News’ on the sidelines of the African Green Revolution Forum in Nairobi, Kenya last week.
The metal silos which are made in the country are sold at approximately 150 US dollars each while the price for plastic silos which are manufactured in Uganda is about eight US dollars, she said. There are no much concerns on the price for hermetic cocoons because they are more appropriate to large aggregators, she added.
Ms Kibaara said the government should also consider including the equipments in the list of subsidized farm inputs to make them more available and affordable to farmers. “Another issue, we are suggesting whenever the government is supplying subsidized inputs, they should throw in our solutions also,” she said.
The Rockefeller Foundation supports the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) which launched a project to test three innovative storage technologies to help the country’s smallholder farmers reduce post-harvest losses.
The three technologies–hermetic cocoons, metal silos and PICs (Purdue Improved Cowpeas) bags – are part of a two year project in response to 2014 impressive bumper harvest of key food crops in Tanzania’s breadbasket regions.
With farmers across Tanzania adopting improved agricultural practices, the country experienced bumper harvest, leading to increased pressure for storage facilities.
Over 22,000 farmers participate in the project, from which lessons will also be drawn on barriers to their adoption to technologies in their trade. AGRA will scale-up these interventions to ensure wider adoption of it.
Source: Daily News