cases from tanzania - Sustainet

4 Agricultural policy in Kenya and Tanzania
• Supporting the private sector to undertake production, input supply and crop marketing.
Measures include removing artificial restrictions on trade such as movement controls and
excessive levies at national, regional and district levels, and reviewing the tax regime.
• Systematic monitoring of the rural food situation through early warning and crop
monitoring systems.
• Restructuring strategic grain reserves to improve their efficiency and effectiveness
(particularly in Tanzania). Crop boards are being restructured to resume regulatory functions,
leaving commercial activities to the cooperative unions and the private sector.
All nations that have transformed their agriculture have embraced these strategies and put
appropriate policies in place to make them work. Clearly, these strategies require mechanisms
that involve producers in identifying problems, and testing and adopting solutions. The
strategies appear to tackle the prevailing problem of food insecurity and to improve living
standards. They also provide incentives to non-governmental organizations to participate
actively in development work.
constraints to sustainable growth in agriculture
Despite this series of reforms, agriculture in Kenya and Tanzania has failed to take off. The
reforms concentrated on facilitating the process of globalization, but failed to establish a
basis for sustainable development. Policy makers perhaps mistakenly assumed that macroeconomic
reforms are the sole remedy to poverty alleviation. Allowing currencies to float
has the potential to reward exporters (and incidentally of making imports relatively more
expensive in local currency terms). A number of producers of export crops such as coffee,
tea and sugar have indeed seen their incomes rise. But poor infrastructure and weak institutions
mean that most farmers operate in a risky environment. The result has been increased
poverty and hunger in rural areas. Per-capita food production and net export earnings have
fallen or at best stagnated. The income gap between rich and poor has widened, leaving the
rural poor far behind.
Agricultural performance was extremely disappointing during most of the 1970s and 1980s.
But despite the policy reforms of the 1990s, production per capita has declined. Agriculture
has performed more poorly in eastern and southern Africa than in the continent as a whole
(Mbelle, 2001; Mtatifikolo, 1998; Mukibi et al. 2002).
The reforms improved conditions for the market to perform, but there has been insufficient
support to allow the huge number of smallholder farmers to use the new opportunities. So
food security has not improved. The annual growth rate of Kenyan agriculture has dropped
by about 60%, with no compensatory rise in the industrial or service sectors. Though the
macro indicators in Tanzania seem good, the performance of the agricultural sector still
has not curbed the shortage of food. Both countries are confronted with escalating food
insecurity. Their economies have stagnated or declined, income disparity has widened, and
poverty among the rural masses has become more intense. Based on their macro-economic
indicators, Uganda is the most successful country in East Africa; Tanzania is improving, but
Kenya is disappointingly declining.
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