Tanzania, China join hands to boost rice harvests

One early morning this month, a Tanzanian villager named Tatu sat outside her house cooking and selling vitumbua - buns made of rice flour. Behind her stood a huge stone house. She explained that the low building at the corner of the land was for poultry and rabbit farming, a new activity in which she was dabbling.

But the source of her income is from growing rice. She lives in the village of Dakawa, one of Tanzania's major rice production areas.

The land is blanketed with deep green paddy lands, and farmers are expecting a bumper harvest in a month. The new variety takes about 100 days to mature. With an extensive irrigation system fed by the Wami-Ruvu river basin, and the help of Chinese experts, farmers here plant rice twice a year.

Agriculture is booming in the area and, according to government data, remains the exclusive means of income for 51 percent of the residents of Dakawa, which is in Tanzania's Morogoro region and is nearly 255 kilometers from Dar es Salaam, the nation's largest city.

Rice yields in Morogoro have increased, thanks to access to high-yield seeds coupled with farming techniques introduced by Chinese experts, according to Andrew Ngereza, the center manager at the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute-Dakawa.

The state-backed research institute of the Tanzanian Agriculture Ministry is partnering with the China Agricultural Technology Demonstration Center to provide demonstrations of improved cultivars - plant varieties cultivated by selective breeding - and techniques, and to train local farmers and technicians in local and Chinese agricultural technologies, particularly for rice.

The demonstration center is one of the 14 proposed by China at the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in 2006.

China built the center, which was handed over to the Tanzanian government in 2011, for about $6 million on a 62-hectare site. Design and construction were completed by Chongqing Zhongyi Seeds Industry Co, which is affiliated with the Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Sciences. It consists of experimental fields, offices, a laboratory and a training area, together with 50 hectares under irrigation.

The partnership has also spread to maize tissue culture, vegetable tissue culture, banana tissue culture and poultry farming.

"We have jointly undertaken research and developed high-yield seeds that are drought-tolerant," said Ngereza. "Furthermore, the center has demonstrated how these varieties, coupled with modern farming techniques from China, can increase productivity."

In May, Tanzania announced plans to boost annual rice production from 2.2 million tons to 4.5 million in a 12-year national plan. Local demand for rice reached 2.05 million tons last year, according to a recent report by the government.

Tanzania is the second-largest rice producer in sub-Saharan Africa and accounts for 74 percent of the country's land, according to 2017 research for the China-Africa Research Initiative. But it continues to import around 5 percent of its domestically consumed rice.

Low productivity in Tanzania is the result of low soil fertility, high soil salinity levels, droughts and unstable markets, as well as poor innovation and limited use of improved technology. This is in addition to poor mechanization and high use of labor, which pushes production costs and triggers price increases to above those of global markets, according to the report.

The center has therefore addressed issues such as capacity building, through which nearly 6,000 farmers have been trained, including government extension officers.

Chinese experts have been instrumental in boosting productivity, said Ngereza, the research center director. "They have introduced new cultivation techniques using our own variety. The production in the area has tripled."

Initially, the changes met with resistance. A guard at the research center who also owns land watched skeptically as rice expert Li Xianhui applied fertilizer two to three days before planting rice seedlings. The guard, surnamed Juma, said the fertilizer was being wasted.

To the contrary, the early application infused the soil with nutrients before the introduction of the seedlings, said Li. "It increases production without increasing input." Additional fertilizer is applied after a month.

Li had more knowledge to pass along, including the need for precision in how far apart seedlings are planted to guarantee adequate sunshine and wind.

Juma's views changed by harvest time. From the usual 35 to 50 bags harvested from a 0.9-hectare piece of land, the produce went up to 78 bags.

"Juma is now a believer," said Li, who has been in Tanzania for 10 years.

There are three experts from Chongqing at the center, which has undertaken trials and demonstrations of 17 hybrid cultivars suitable for rainy season and 31 for dry season. Only government-approved seeds are used.

Meanwhile, in order to address labor challenges, tractors are now used for planting and harvesting.

"The idea is to encourage farmers to abandon outdated, labor-intensive practices," said Ngereza. "Through cooperatives, they can hire these machines. It is a practice that has been successful in other regions."

Chen Zhengming, the Chinese experts' team leader, said the aim of the center is to boost the country's food production. "With national governments having competing priorities, research, especially in food crops, is not given adequate attention," Chen said. "This is an area in which we are making farming sustainable in Africa."

Contact the writers at lucymorangi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Global 06/24/2019 page1)