Posted on February, 27, 2019 at 10:00 am
NUMEROUS challenges facing the country’s grain producing industry have forced Eastern Africa Grain Council (EAGC) to seek partnership with Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives to address them.
EAGC’s Communications Officer, Fredrick Costa said in Dar es Salaam yesterday that grain producers are facing many problems including reducing costs of production and availability of markets.
Costa said other challenges facing the grain producing family are increasing post-harvest losses, use of poor quality seeds, lack of value addition technologies and poor infrastructure to stimulate growth and boost contribution to gross domestic product.
“We met with Ministry officials last month in Dodoma during we discussed plans to address these challenges,” he noted saying that in order to have effective communication between the ministry and EAGC officials, they agreed to have private sector desk at the ministry.
“This desk will be dealing with the main challenges facing the private sector in terms of availability of hybrid seeds, agricultural inputs, access to funding and markets, among others,” the EAGC Communications Officers added.
Since year 2006, the EAGC has played a leading role to deliver value and benefits to its members who include grain farmers or producers, traders, processors as well as other stakeholders who take part in the industry.
Last year, EAGC played a key role in persuading the government to remove value added tax imposed on imported soya cake which is one of major and scarce ingredient for animal feeds which has led to affordable animal feed products.
“But the VAT waiver also helped increase government revenue due an increase in the number of livestock being kept but also import duty paid on the soya cake,” Costa pointed out. He also listed other achievements made in 2018 as several policy advocacy successes, capacity building of smallholder farmers through training with over 300 involved.
“We also enabled these farmers attend the 6th Agribusiness Expo in Arusha organized by EAGC and Selian Agricultural Research Institute where they showcased their merchandise but also learnt from other exhibitors,” the EAGC spokesperson underlined.
The EAGC which is backed by Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, also managed to build capacity of 95,651 maize and soya farmers from Ihemi – Ludewa cluster and linked them with a local buyer, SIlverland Limited which bought the commodity at 310/- per kilogram compared to 220/- per kg in 2017.
Source: IPP Media