By Abela Msikula
The Citizen Correspondent Dar es Salaam.
The Citizen Correspondent Dar es Salaam.
Since 2009, food for schoolchildren has created an agricultural market
in Tanzania valued at approximately $11.5 million of which $1.3 million
was produced directly from smallholder farmers through World Food
Programme (WFP)’s purchase for progress initiative.
In
Tanzania, 85 per cent of maize produced by low income farmers. Low
productivity, distance from markets and a lack of credit limit farmers’
capacity to do business.
Among other
intentions of Purchase for Progress (P4P) since 2008 is to connect
farmers to agricultural markets and support them to become competitive
players in the market place.
It directly buys
from farmer groups through a competitive tendering process while
suppliers compete to sell to it under favorable conditions.
About
a year now, WFP has purchased almost 100,000 metric tonnes of maize
from the National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA) in which the opportunities
for smallholder farmers to sell to NFRA gives them access to a
profitable value chain.
“Since 2008, P4P in
Tanzania has been initiated specifically to increase the capacity of
farmers to sell their crops at fair price and boost their income. It
targets farmers through associations which are often hindered by poor
infrastructure, leaving farmers isolated and unable to reach markets,”
says WFP in Tanzania 2013’s report.
WFP’s
county programme activities have resulted in the implementation of Food
for Assets (FFA), Food for Education, and nutrition activities in
drought prone areas of the country wherein under FFA, food is used as an
incentive for beneficiaries to participate in asset creation, as well
as soil and water conservation activities such as building irrigation
canal, charco dams, fish ponds, and market access roads.
Agricultural
outputs are buried by diverse man-made and natural phenomena: FFA still
reveals that land and environmental degradation are significant causes
of high exposure to disaster risks even at normal times.
About
20 per cent of the world’s susceptible dry lands are affected by
human-induced soil degradation, putting the livelihoods of more than one
billion people at risk.
In Africa alone, 650
million people are dependent on rain-fed agriculture in environments
that are affected by water scarcity and land degradation.
“About
14 African countries are subject to water stress or water scarcity due
to land degradation, and a further 11 countries will join them by 2025.
These parts are also the area’s most affected by recurrent droughts and
floods, unpredictable weather patterns, and food insecurity. The extreme
level of fragility of many ecosystems is becoming the leveling factor
of vulnerability, gradually affecting food insecure and non- food
insecure alike, particularly in areas highly prone to droughts and
floods,” says FFA Manual Module (2011).
It has
been said that in most of the livelihood contexts, the ability of
livelihood systems to maintain productivity, when subject to disturbing
forces-whether a stress or a shock, is highly diminished.
Within
that condition, the poorest households are also the ones most affected
by food insecurity, less resilient to climate variability, and more
involved in detrimental coping strategies.
Environmentalists
say that, in dry land livelihood systems, agrarian, pastoral or
agro-pastoral alike, entire community may be threatened by advancing
sand dunes or crusting soils, significant crop failures due to dry
spells, wind erosion, overgrazing and reduction of tree and grass
vegetation cover, depletion of water tables, droughts and deterioration
of water regimes during and after the short-high powered rains.
In
these environments, the Manual Module says, the range and type of
interventions chosen to address the food security problem need to be
linked together as part of an overall area-based or territorial unit
development plan which in arid lands requires well defined technical
approaches and consultative processes within and between communities
within these units.
Climate change will only increase these extremes and change weather patterns compounding these already severe problems.
For
betterments of Tanzanians, FFA is set to achieve multiple objectives by
dealing with building or restoration specific assets that reduce the
impacts of shocks that contribute to food insecurity.
It
is also selected to offer employment and rebuild community
infrastructure, support access to markets, restore the natural resource
base, or protect the environment, reclaim marginal or wasted land to
provide productive assets to land poor and food insecure households,
assist marginalized groups and women to improve and diversify income
sources, and promote skills transfers.
Many of
these interventions also reduce disaster risk and increase the capacity
of households to manage shocks by building resilience and in some cases
supporting climate change adaptation.
The
role of FFA in arresting soil erosion, reducing floods, increase
moisture into the soil profile, harvest water, and increase vegetation
cover, are all aspects linked to the reduction of the impact of shocks,
and increase the ability of households to diversify their sources of
income.
Implementations of food for education
and nutrition activities programmes, WFP says that, school meals
safeguard education, promotes gender equality and provide a range of
socio-economic benefits including enhanced nutrition and child health.
It
currently provides a school meal per day to over half a million primary
school children in 1,167 schools countrywide for the aim of increasing
enrolment and attendance; improve concentration span, learning capacity,
and reduce drop-out and gender disparity.
“What
we want to achieve is to support the government to develop and
implement a national school meals programme. The programme is
implemented in 1,167 schools in 16 drought-prone food insecure districts
of Arusha, Manyara, Dodoma, Shinyanga and Singida,” the report says.
