Africa-Press – Tanzania. THE Cereals and Other Pro- duce Board of Tanzania (CPB) will secure a loan of 50bn/- to buy maize from farmers, thus assuring them of ready market after the harvests.
This comes as another development, following last week’s revelation in the Parliament by the Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa that the government had also allocated 50bn/- to the National Food Re- serve Agency (NFRA) to buy the crop from growers starting today.
Reinforcing this, Government Chief Spokesperson Gerson Msigwa in Dodoma yesterday, said the Finance and Planning Ministry has already disbursed the money to the NFRA, adding that the State has also assured the CPB to secure the loan to buy the crop.
“The government has giv- en surety to the CPB to secure the loan in order to address the problem of lack of market for maize farmers,” Mr Msigwa explained.
Equally, the board has agreed that the loan be acquired from banks so that it could pur- chase the maize at good market price and sell them within and outside the country.“Traders buy maize from farmers at a price of between 250/- and 300/- per kilo- gramme, but the NFRA would buy the crop at 500/- and the CPB would have its price(s) that would be best to make the market be competitive.
“Our aim is that farmers get good prices, so that they earn good money to start prep- arations for the next farming season. We are aware of chal- lenges regarding high prices of farm inputs such as fertilisers due to increased prices in the world market. The govern- ment makes efforts to motivate traders import more fertilisers so that local prices could fall,” he said.
So far, the CPB has already got market for the produce in neighbouring countries including Kenya that requires 100,000 tonnes, South Sudan (200,000 tonnes) and World Food Programme (20,000 tonnes).
During this harvest season, farmers have harvested maize roughly registering seven million tonnes, while local annual demand is between 570,000 and 580,000 tonnes. Speaking over current high prices of edible oil, he said the price of the product in the world market has also increased.
Currently, the price of cooking oil has gone up to 1,000 US dollars (about 2300/-) from between 500-700 US dollars (about 1600/-) per tonne.
The price increase in the world market has led to an increase of prices in the local market.
In addressing the chal- lenge, the government has now put more emphasis on production of sunflower seedlings and cotton seedlings.
The government has also disbursed 11bn/- for importa- tion of such seedlings for the regions of Dodoma, Singida and Simiyu, which have been earmarked for edible oil pro- duction.
Meanwhile, the government is in the process of finalizing introduction of ‘Co- vid-19 Vaccination Week’. Mr Msigwa noted that the ‘Covid-19 Vaccination Week’ will officially start at the end of this month.
So far, 345,000 Tanzanians have been vaccinated and the immunization exercise continues and will now focus on taking the jabs to the rural areas to relieve the residents the burden of travelling long distance to urban centres for the vaccine.
Already 34 per cent of the total 1,058,000 doses have been administered to Tanzanians and the government considers importing more doses.
Mr Msigwa further spoke about the stock of medicine in the country, saying between March and August this year, the government gave the Medical Stores Department (MSD) 263bn/- to buy and supply them from suppliers.
“Currently, the situation of the medicines availability at our health centres through the MSD has increased from 21 per cent to 61 per cent and we are approaching 62 per cent.Our expectation is that the situation will further improve,” he said.
The government’s plan is to ensure that all 500 health centres and 200 others that are still under construction get ad- equate drugs’ supplies.
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