DODOMA: THE government has outlined its key priorities for the Ministry of Agriculture in the next financial year, among them coming up with Agricultural Transformation Master Plan-2050 which seeks to steer up development in the agricultural sector for the next 25 years.
Minister for Agriculture, Hussein Bashe said the master plan will provide a road map to policy changes and agricultural strategies in the ministry.
He was speaking in parliament yesterday when tabling his ministry’s budget for 2024/2025 fiscal year where he asked legislators to endorse 1.25tril/- in both recurrent and development expenditures.
Other top priorities the minister noted include increasing decent jobs and enhancing youths and women participation in agriculture sector, which will involve empowering them to have block farms as well as enhancing the participation of youths and women in the Building a Better Tomorrow (BBT) programme.
Also, in the priorities are improving food and nutrition security, strengthening access to market, agriculture financing and crop exports as well as strengthening cooperative development.
“They also include agriculture digitisation, which will involve strengthening digital systems that will facilitate access to timely information as well as intensifying digital use in the agriculture sector,’’ he said.
Presenting the report for a parliamentary standing committee on Trade, Industries, Agriculture and Livestock, the committee chairperson, Deodatus Mwanyika noted that despite allocating huge budget to the ministry of agriculture, still Tanzania was lagging behind on the implementation of the Maputo (2003) and Malabo (2014) Protocols which wants member states to allocate at least 10 per cent of the total budget to the agriculture sector.
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The committee also recommended that because of lack of enough fertiliser, productivity was still a problem to smallholder farmers, therefore it suggested that the government should intensify massive awareness campaigns the fertiliser subsidy system because it was still not known to many farmers.
We are still facing a dire shortage of agricultural extension offices because the demand is at least 20,000 officers but still we are at 35 per cent, and this shortage cannot bring the desired results,’’ insisted the committee chairperson.
If increasing productivity and production is anything to go by, the committee suggested that investing in seedling research was very important so that farmers get the best seeds that will finally meet the production targets.
But in his budget speech, the Minister for Agriculture told parliamentarians that on having proper and appropriate seeds, the ministry in collaboration with the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) will in the next financial year (2024/25) intensify on the various diseases that have been affecting productivity.
“Also, TARI will continue with research on soybeans rust, cassava mosaic disease and cassava brown streak disease in the cassava products as well as conducting further studies on Cashew Leaf and Nut Blight,’’ he said.
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