Posted on August, 23, 2021 at 09:22 am
THE government has reinstated its continuous will to invest in researching suit seeds for producing cooking oils in a bid to peddle away from import dependency.
The statement came at a time when the government upped the funds for research by between 30 and 50 per cent in this year budget to enable institutes to conduct more studies on eligible oils. Minister for Industry and Trade Mr Exaud Kigahe said the government has thrown its weight to edible oil sector-especially the sunflower subsector-by investing more in quality seed research and oil production capacity.
"The end goal is to facilitate further research on production of quality seeds including for the edible oil seeds," said Mr Kigahe when closing Singida's Sunflower Stakeholders forum. In this fiscal year, the government raised the budget of the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) by 58 per cent from 7.35bn/- to 11.63bn/-.
Also the budget of the Agricultural Seed Agency (ASA) went up by 95.2 per cent from 5.42bn/- to 10.58bn/-.
The forum was accompanied by a cooking oil exhibition that showcases the implementation of a project funded by the European Union (EU) through SADC.
The Ministry of Industry and Trade, Deputy Permanent Secretary, Dr Hashil Abdallah, said that they also arranged face-toface (B2B) meetings between farmers and processors.
The B2B centered on bypassing middlemen on selling seeds business to enable farmers to buy at processors' price.
Source: Daily News