Posted on November, 19, 2019 at 08:35 am
To achieve the mission, the government and the private sector ought to come together and make sure that ecological organic agriculture guarantees food security, links the industrialization motive to the livelihood improvement of the people.
In a move to promote organic agriculture in the country, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Tanzania and French Embassy have organized a National Ecological Organic Agriculture Conference to be held in Dodoma later this month to, among other things, reveal how organic agriculture can ensure food security and safety.
Speaking in Dar es Salaam over the weekend, FAO’s Representative to the country, Fred Kafeero said that the agro ecology conference is aimed at creating awareness of the concept and its advantages to policymakers and development partners.
“The conference aims to exhibit and exchange best cases on how EOA is at the core of sustainable development through its multidimensional impact that include food security, nutrition and safety,” Kafeero said.
“It also seek to link initiatives that support scaling up agro ecosystems for increased productivity, in quality and quantity, while ensuring resilience and sustainability for achieving food security, poverty reduction and enhancing a green and resilient economy,” he noted.
The French Ambassador to Tanzania, Frédéric Clavier seconded the FAO chief’s observation by saying that agriculture and biodiversity preservation are key issues of interest to the French government’s agenda on climate change adaptation and mitigation.
“To demonstrate this ambition, France supports a project with a grant of U$1 million dubbed ‘Preservation of biodiversity and support to smallholder farmers towards an agro ecological transition’ which involves 6,000 smallholder farmers, 269 farmers’ groups and eight farmers’ associations benefitting from the projects based in Mtwara region,” Clavier said.
According to the FiBL survey 2019, the United States and the European Union stands as main destinations for the world’s certified organic products from Africa and Asia.
The FiBL survey states that global organic market reached 92.1 billion euros by February 2019 (from data collected since 2017) whereby 69.8 million hectares worldwide are under organic agricultural management and Africa has only 2.1 million hectares.
According to the survey, Tanzania and Uganda are the only countries from the EAC region with the largest number of organic producers in the world.
Uganda took the second position in the list with 210,352 producers of organic products behind the India with 835,000. Tanzania is the sixth with 148,610 producers. The other countries are Mexico, Ethiopia, Philippines, Peru, Turkey, Italy and Paraguay. The survey states that there were 41 million hectares of wild collection and beekeeping areas during the period under review.
FiBL asserts that in Uganda, fruits are a large component of organic exports. In particular, organic producers in Uganda grow apples, bananas, pineapple and passion fruit for markets in Europe. Demand is high for these exotic products, and processors in Uganda add value by drying and packaging them ready for retail sale.
In Tanzania, organic cocoa and green grams are advantageous crops. Organic cocoa production is concentrated mainly in one district of Kyela where several large trading companies are based.
Organic green grams are produced as a secondary crop by most of the nation’s cotton farmers based in Shinyanga, with easy access to the northern borders.
Source: IPP Media