News Brief: Week of June 28th 2010

The Eastern Africa Grain Council (EAGC) wants finance ministers in the EAC trade bloc to consider lifting the ban on cereal exports and instead encourage intra-regional dealings.

The council says that it is concerned about the continued government involvement in the cereals sub-sector, insisting that such a grip was a stumbling block towards growth and production.

“The key concern for players in the maize and grain industry is the continued involvement by governments in an era where other sectors have been relieved of this involvement and the lack of progress in finding a long-term solution for a sector that has more potential than anything else,” EAGC executive director Constantine Kandie said on 7 June.

Ms Kandie asked the respective ministers of finance to look at ways that will open the market for more competition.

Such measures should also encourage farmers to approach maize growing as a business undertaking.

Maize market

In 2007, the size of the regional maize market (EAC and COMESA) was estimated at slightly over $1 billion with the region’s share in this being a mere 13 per cent.

“This clearly demonstrates an existence of a regional market potential of about 77 per cent which is up for grabs,” said Ms Kandie.

An analysis done by the EAGC says that the time has come for the Kenyan and other East African Community governments to uphold free market principles in the maize sector where the forces of demand and supply are left to dictate the cost of the produce.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper invited seven African countries to attend this year's Group of Eight (G8) summit to be held in his country on Jun. 25-26. They are: South Africa, Malawi, Ethiopia, Senegal, Nigeria, Algeria and Egypt.

Dr Francis Ikome, director of the African and southern African programme at the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD), is sceptical about Africa being represented at the G8. "Since NEPAD's launch it has become a trend among the industrialised countries to invite African countries to summits like those of the G8.

"Many promises are usually made but the real delivery always falls far short of the promises. The important question here is if these countries will be able to make submissions. This is a meeting of industrialised, Western countries. I believe African countries have been invited for window-dressing purposes."

The meeting includes an "outreach session" in which the seven African invitees will participate alongside Jamaica, Haiti and Columbia, three countries invited on the basis of Canada's foreign policy objectives in the Americas.
 
Ikome cautions that, "African leaders make themselves objects of ridicule if they just engage in conversations on the sidelines of these kinds of meetings. A leader should not fly all the way to Canada just to speak in the corridors." IGD is an international relations research institution based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

But Trudi Hartzenberg, executive director of the Trade Law Centre (TRALAC) for Southern Africa, thinks that meetings on the sideline can be beneficial to African countries. "One should not forget that important bilateral discussions often take place outside the formal meetings. It is during more informal gatherings that important deals can be struck and issues raised that can be taken forward."

TRALAC, based near Cape Town, South Africa, is a not-for-profit organisation building trade law capacity in southern Africa.

Dr Mzukisi Qobo, programme head for emerging powers and global leadership challenges at the South African Institute for International Affairs (SAIIA), also adopts a milder position: "Canada is concerned that the momentum around African issues that was launched at the Gleneagles summit in Scotland in 2005 is waning.

"At Gleneagles 25 billion dollars was pledged to Africa, of which only about USD13 billion has materialised," he adds. SAIIA is a non-governmental research institution in Johannesburg, South Africa.
 
Other promises at Gleneagles, which was attended by the leaders of Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania, included more support to Africa's peacekeeping forces; and increased investment in education and combating killer diseases like HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

There was also the vague suggestion to "one day" end the rich Western world's protectionist trade practices; and debt cancellation worth 40 billion dollars was pledged to the poorest countries, including those in Africa. The G8's European members also committed themselves to a foreign aid target of 0.56 percent of gross domestic product by 2010 and 0.7 percent by 2015.

"The seven African invitees have been chosen with great care because they all play important roles in Africa currently," argues Qobo.

Meles Zenawi, prime minister of Ethiopia, has for some time been the darling of the Western world, notwithstanding human rights "challenges" in his country, according to Qobo. Ethiopia is regarded as one of the U.S.'s strongest allies in Africa, a relationship that is pursued due to its geographic proximity to the Middle East.

Algeria and Senegal are influential francophone countries while Nigeria and Egypt are significant regional powers in West and North Africa, respectively.

South Africa is regarded as the economic and political powerhouse of Africa and the driver of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). In addition Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt and Senegal were, with South Africa, the initiators of NEPAD.

Malawi, the smallest and poorest of the seven, is currently chairing the African Union.

Qobo continues: "There is an ongoing process in the Canadian foreign ministry to develop and maintain a strategy on Africa. There is concern about the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) engaging African countries. Africa has consolidated important relations with these countries and this bond is seen as a threat to Western countries.

"Canada wants to understand how it can meaningfully engage with Africa regarding issues around security, aid, trade and investment."

Experts Skeptical on Africa Invitations to G8

Hartzenberg regards the fact that the invitation has been extended to such a diverse number of African countries as significant. "It often happens that South Africa is seen as the 'spokescountry' for the rest of Africa. But Africa is a diverse continent.

"Many of the smaller countries seldom get a chance to be highlighted on an international stage. The needs of a small country like Malawi are vastly different to that of Egypt, for example, and it has to put its own case forward."

Hartzenberg argues that Western countries which, for the most part, have forsaken the pledges made at Gleneagles use the global recession as an easy excuse not to fulfil promises.

Ikome's final criticism is that the G8 is losing its significance on the global stage: "It is being replaced by the Group of 20 (G20). It would be far better for African countries to be represented at G20 summits."

Those suffering most from food insecurity are subsistence farmers, pastoralists and agro-pastoralists whose livelihoods largely depend on agriculture and animal production.

The interagency Taskforce on the UN Response to Long-Term Food Security, Agricultural Development and Other Related Aspects in Africa that was established by Kofi Anan in 2001 identified natural hazards, conflict and population growth as the main underlying causes of food insecurity.

Between 15 to 20 million people in Africa especially the pastoralist communities live mainly in arid and semi-arid low lands. They suffer from droughts where food production is reducing and many risk losing their assets.

With limited food and water availability, animals produce less milk, are more prone to diseases and their death incidence rates increases.

The UN organisation says others factors contributing to food insecurity are forced displacement, poverty, trans-boundary diseases, poor health, gender inequalities, weak infrastructure, poor economies, as well as inadequate national policies and governance issues, aid failure and weak knowledge and information systems.

Current situation

According to the Food Security, Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) map released in April, food security in Africa is a cause for concern with many areas said to be in acute food shortage especially Southern Sudan, Northern Kenya and North eastern Uganda.

The situation is most alarming in Sudan (Darfur) and Somalia (Central) where populations cannot live without humanitarian aid. Natural hazards, drought and floods are the driving forces behind the looming hunger across the continent, especially because they hit they hit the poorest (mostly rural) communities the hardest.

Land regime

The population in Africa has more than doubled since 1974 and is continuing to grow rapidly, putting further pressure on scarce natural resources. There is shortage of arable land as farmers are forced to cultivate intensively and often cannot replenish the soil.

Land ownership issues and the increasingly limited access to cultivable land, water and other natural resources are key to rural populations' livelihoods, yet, they have become a raison d'être for population movements and conflicts.

Conflicts

The long history of conflicts both internal and across boundaries has disrupted agricultural and livestock productions and marketing systems, causing mass displacements of already marginalised populations, thereby intensifying hunger and putting vulnerable populations even more at risk of food insecurity.

The tensions are the hotbed for the influx of refugees and IDPs putting further pressure on already scare resources accessible to host populations, thereby affecting their food security situation and potentially initiating additional tensions.

More than half of the populations in the region survive on less than a dollar (Shs2,000) per day. With little or no savings and lack of skills to diversify their sources of income, the poor people are exposed to more dangers let alone starvation.

Poor health

Countries in Africa have some of the lowest health standards in the world. Whilst rural communities in general have limited access to adequate health services, those worst served are the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralist communities. Among them, children and women are the most vulnerable with high children undernourishment and mortality rates related to preventable diseases (measles, malaria etc.) and high level of maternal mortality. There are more than four million people living with HIV/Aids in the Horn of Africa alone, according to the 2008 Unaids report. The organisation projected that by 2010, twice as many people in rural areas will be infected compared to those in urban areas.

Gender Inequities

Increasingly, men are migrating to urban areas looking for labour, leaving women with the burden of taking care of the family farms. Although women are in charge of cooking and collecting water for the household, land rights are often passed on through male relatives. Often lacking sufficient education, women have limited options because of food insecurity and poverty. Gender inequities also often translate into gender based violence, affecting food security at household and community level.

Weak infrastructures

Due to the poor conditions or nonexistence of roads, populations living in remote rural areas have very limited access to external markets and many farmers and agro-pastoralists are therefore isolated from the national and regional economy. Access to safe drinking water is also insufficient, rural populations in Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia are particularly affected.

Poor economies

Economic growth in Africa has generally been slow and unequal, widening the gap between the poor majority and the wealthy.

Pastoralist communities have benefited from the liberalisation of markets in Africa and are generally better off than farmers. However, when there is a natural disaster, they are most vulnerable as they risk losing all their assets. Little has been done to support pastoralists systems and initiatives that have been taken have often deteriorated the situation by increasing livestock numbers and leading to overgrazing rather than regulating the systems.

Governance failure

Unstable Government institutions in conflict and post-conflict countries, over centralisation, corruption and insufficient political commitment to address food insecurity; are factors to food insecurity but also represent considerable obstacles for donors and the international community to provide effective emergency relief and sustainable basis for economic growth.

Financial crisis

The dramatic rise of global food prices in early 2008 rapidly followed by the global financial crisis and economic recession had the most drastic consequences on the global food and nutrition in decades. Their overlap caused socio-economic, environmental and security related issues worldwide. Countries in Africa affected by the 2006 drought had no time to recover before the soaring food prices and a drought crisis that hit them once more in 2009. The most devastating effects of these two crises were felt in the agricultural sector and amongst the urban poor and the food insecure. Poor households saw their coping mechanisms strained to their limits and hunger and undernourishment incidences increased dramatically in the region. Whilst food prices have decreased overall in the region, they are still above the five year average and are likely to remain volatile for some time, putting further pressure on the most vulnerable as remittances are decreasing and both formal and informal economies at local and regional levels are affected.

Climate change

Climate change threatens to further exacerbate food insecurity in Africa.

Crop yields in dry, tropical and semitropical regions risk to decrease due to global warming. Extreme climate events such as droughts, flooding and heat stress are increasing both in frequency and gravity; which affects food production, stability and availability, especially as their combination and recurrence set the right conditions for human, crop, livestock pests and diseases to spread. Increased incidence of water born diseases in flood-prone areas, and new diseases will increase human health risks. Access to safe drinking water is also likely to become more scarce.

The resilience of smallholder and subsistence farmers will be challenged, which may lead to further environmental degradation, further population movements and increasingly to resource-based conflicts. Unless adequate action is taken, it is predicted that the food security and nutrition situation will negatively affected Sub- Saharan Africa.

Through the Purchase for Progress initiative, which is financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, WFP plans to buy an estimated 126,000 tons of food from local farmers over the next five years.
 
Mohamed Diab, the country director for WFP in Ethiopia, said the initiative should benefit both the agency and the farmers, whose incomes and know-how will rise as they become more familiar with the agricultural marketplace.

"The farmers have a secure market and income, encouraging them to grow more food, and WFP can buy food at competitive prices for people in need in Ethiopia," Mr. Diab said.

Under an initial phase of the project, which kicked off in February, WFP has bought more than 5,500 tons of maize and beans from cooperative unions based in three regions of the country.

WFP already buys vast quantities of food in Ethiopia to help people in need. The agency bought at least 592,000 tons of cereals, beans, salt and fortified food valued at $183 million between 2004 and 2009 - or enough to feed about 4 million people a month.

Reacting to Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson's answer to a parliamentary question earlier this week that only 4% of the budget of the Agricultural Research Council was spent on research, with the rest going on salaries, AgriSA, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Freedom Front Plus said this was a disaster in the making.

DA MP Laurie Bosman , who had posed the parliamentary question, said agricultural research was of cardinal importance if SA were to compete on the international market, particularly in segments where many products were substantially subsidised by foreign governments.

It was clear, he said, that the research council was completely underfunded and was losing key personnel to the private sector.

AgriSA president Johannes Möller agreed. He said international best practice was for 10% of the national budget to be spent on agriculture, but in SA it was 0,5%.

Also international best practice showed that about 3% of the agriculture budget should be spent on research.
 
This should mean about R2,2bn for agricultural research but the current budget was less than half of that at R938m, Mr Möller said.

"By spending 96% of the budget on salaries all they are doing is holding on to staff while all the research capabilities are collapsing. The situation is threatening both food security and food safety," Mr Möller said.

He added that if there were further outbreaks of serious disease, worse than the recent Rift Valley Fever outbreak, then SA would not have the capacity to defend itself against the threat.

Both he and Mr Bosman mentioned the situation at Onderstepoort, once a world-renowned veterinary research centre, where the technology is outdated and there is already a substantial backlog in maintenance funding.

Freedom Front Plus MP Corné Mulder said without well-funded research SA would never compete globally and "if we can't put more funds into research then a different model will have to be found".

He also agreed that without cutting-edge research into African solutions for African agricultural problems, food security and food safety were at risk.

Mr Bosman said that the reply from Ms Joemat-Pettersson also indicated that the research council was losing key skilled people, as evidenced by the number of vacancies in the organisation - at 26% - and that there was no funding or plan to recruit further skills.

He also pointed at the outdated technology - "you cannot do anything without technology, this is coming to nothing".

All along the 75 kilometre road between the capital Brazzaville, and Kinkala, the southern region's principal city, there are bundles of wood and sacks of charcoal stacked ready to be trucked to feed the household energy demands of the capital.
 
Since the end of the civil wars which lasted from 1998 to 2003, production of charcoal and firewood has become profitable for the people in the Pool department, one of 12 administrative areas in the country.

There are farmers who produce nearly 300 sacks of charcoal every three months. A 15-kilo bag of sells for the equivalent of $10 in Brazzaville.

"Once they've acquired land, farmers prefer to cut trees down to make charcoal and go sell it in Brazzaville, rather than wait two years to harvest a field of cassava. With the money they earn, they buy their supplies of manioc and fufu in Brazzaville," Virgil Safoula told IPS. Safoula is director of a non-governmental organisation called Environment and Development of Community Initiatives (known by its French acronym, EDIC)

Most of the food sold in Kinkala now comes from the cities.

"Non-wood products such as mushrooms, caterpillars and asparagus have disappeared from Pool forests," Prosper Mayembo, director of environment for the Pool Department, told IPS.

According to the Pool Departmental Council, before the war, the region's 44,000 hectares of arable land accounted for fully 30 percent of national agricultural production.

"The practice of charcoal production and bush fires have stripped and depleted soils, to the point that famine is overtaking Pool," says Safoula.

According to government statistics, more than 6,000 hectares of forest were lost in this department between 2007 and 2008. And during the first quarter of 2009 alone, over 62,000 sacks of charcoal were produced in the district of Kinkala, more than 78 percent of them from Pool.

In the same period, 200,000 bundles of firewood from Kinkala were transported to the capital. "As long as energy needs ... remain important in Brazzaville, the forests will be seen as a solution," Mayembo told IPS.

Not even fruit trees are spared, says Emmanuel Sengomona, a landowner in Kinkala. "As you can see, almost everything has been razed. Mango, avocado and safou ended up in the charcoal ovens." (Safou is a dark, oily fruit widely eaten in Central Africa.)

"When we were growing up, our parents hunted in large forests here. But today, there is no more game," said 60-year-old Matthias Youlou.

"My fear is to see Pool become a desert because they cut the trees without respite. There will be no agriculture and we will die of hunger," says Mayembo.

A farmer from Mabaya, who wouldn't give her name, shrugged off the criticism. "If we do not do this, how will we live?" The sale of firewood can bring in the equivalent of 3,000 dollars every three months, she says.

Congo has laws to prevent the wholesale destruction of forest, but the trucks bearing this eviscerating cargo stream into Brazzaville undistrubed.

"These trucks pass through because they're paying money to the government. It's a shame because we do not respect the ratified conventions. The government can not stop the traffic," says EDIC's Safoula.

"When shipments of wood and coal are seized, how many people pay fines as the law requires? None. They negotiate to pay less," says Mayembo.
 
But the situation is not simply one of easily-corrupted inspectors. "Most people involved are former militiamen," says Mayembo. "We must avoid reigniting the fire (of civil war) by stopping them abruptly. We must therefore proceed with tact."

NGOs are severely critical of this attitude. "At Missafou and Madzia (areas in Pool), we see how the trains transport the wood to Brazzaville, but the government does nothing. Authorities levy some fees just to camouflage their irresponsibility," said Roger Younga from the Brazzaville-based NGO Congo Vert (Green Congo).

While trying to educate rural communities about the dangers of deforestation, NGOs propose alternatives. "Since 2009, we have maintained a nursery of flame trees, palm trees and jatropha to provide the people of Pool with reforestation alternatives. We've negotiated with Pool land managers and secured a site where the nursery will be installed," says Safoula.

Despite its immense agricultural potential, official statistics state that as a consequence of the 1998-2003 civil war, Pool's inhabitants suffer the highest rates of malnutrition in the country - two in five went hungry at some point in 2009. In a report covering the same year, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) stressed that one in five children in the region suffered chronic malnutrition.

"And if people turn away from agriculture, the impact would be catastrophic," Younga told IPS.

In response to the threat, the World Bank is urging the government to accelerate the process of setting up a national plan to fight deforestation.

"We will allocate 200,000 dollars to the government for the adoption of this plan," said Andre Aquino, head of the World Bank's Reducing the Effects of Deforestation and Degradation programme in the two Congos told IPS.

"Once that is done, NGOs and communities can access our funds because we have up to 3.4 million dollars available."

In his address at a stakeholders meeting in Abuja, the National Coordinator, NAPEP, Dr Magnus Kpakol, said the Federal Government has provided the fund in the 2010 budget for the scheme.
 
"Our idea of MESO credit in Nigeria is a mid range credit from N500, 000 to N50million aimed at creating jobs in the rural areas in a public private partnership (PPP) arrangement," he said

Kpakol emphasised that the fastest way to fight poverty and provide jobs in Nigeria was by leveraging on the country's agricultural base which contributes about 42 per cent of Nigeria's GDP hence the need for MESO.

According to him: "We cannot create jobs magnificently in Nigeria with telecomm, banking or the civil service but we can have a strong economic growth by investing in agriculture."

The coordinator further said that NAPEP would partner with the ministry of agriculture, members of the national assembly, states and local government areas to make MESO a success and rapidly get people out of poverty.

He also said NAPEP would develop the MESO credit idea so that banks would find it useful to get involved with.

On how farmers could access the credit, Kpakol said they would have access to the credit loans either independently or through the processing facility which would be internally regulated by the system itself.

Researchers have developed repellent collars containing the synthetic equivalents of the odours of animals that tsetse flies tend to avoid — such as zebra.

Worn around the necks of the cattle, the collars confuse the flies — reducing the likelihood of bites, which transmit sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis).

According to Rajinder K. Saini — a principal scientist at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) which developed the collar — up to three million cattle die each year from the disease.

"We decided to look for an alternative to the tsetse fly traps that were earlier being used by the pastoralists in Africa. Since the pastoralists are always on the move, we realised that they were leaving the traps behind. They needed a mobile technology, and that is why we decided to look for something more effective," Saini told SciDev.Net.

"Africa is losing a lot. A loss of three million cattle means losing half a million tonnes of milk and one million tonnes of meat annually."

Saini also said since 80 percent of the land in Africa is tilled using cattle, when the animals are sick, less of the land is cultivated.

The European Union has now signed a US$1.8 million deal with icipe to trial the collars with Maasai pastoralists in East Africa over the next three years to ensure that the technology works in its latest form.

The repellent, which has already undergone some tests in Kenya and Zimbabwe, is expected to be a breakthrough.

"Areas that have been avoiding livestock-keeping due to rampant tsetse flies can effectively use this new technology," said Phyllis Ngunjiri, deputy director for research and development at the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute.

"With our networks of farmers in different African countries, we are hoping to diffuse this information fast so that many farmers can start using it,"  said Joseph Methu, head of partnership and capacity development with the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa.

Until recently maize was not a staple food for Rwandans and as such small portions of farms were used to grow maize, for roasting and impungure.

From mid 1990s, maize became a common dish for many families and institutions, just like in other East African states like Kenya Tanzania and Uganda.

Strategies of production, storage and marketing of maize, rice, wheat and other grains is a crucial for food security, so when residents of Katabagema sector in Nyagatare district complained on Radio Rwanda and to their mayor that their harvest was going to waste, their concern was pertinent. It is usual for prices to fluctuate as a result of market forces of supply and demand, but there are levels that could drive farmers out of business if the department of Agriculture does not provide marketing and storage facilities.

One resident of Katabagema said that she had planted only maize on agasozi indatwa ( farms of excellence) and at the price of 50 frw offered by local traders, it was hard for her to buy beans for her family because of high prices compared to maize prices.

In the recent past the Ministry of Agriculture has done a good job modernizing agriculture, Rwanda's main economic base with the introduction of consolidation of land use, providing selected seeds, fertilizers and animals to farmers as well as the introduction of mechanized agriculture.

With the assistance of extension workers, these innovations have been successfully implemented by most farmers throughout the country. For some time, as a result, the country produces surplus food, even areas that were traditionally prone to food scarcity. We need to sustain food suffiency.

I would have loved to pose the question raised by a Katabagema resident to Hon. Agnes Kalibata but she was in a meeting on Tuesday when I visited the ministry. With most of her senior staff also not available.

What can be done to make the said farmer plant maize next season after what he considers a big loss? I know the minister attempted to solve the Nyagatare farmers's problem last month when she promised to get them buyers at a price of 120 fwr per kilo.

The mobilized maize traders instead of buying from local farmers crossed the boarder an bought the maize in Uganda at 90 fwr per kilogram, so the farmers felt let down. Despite the low price of maize to farmers today, however, the consumers in Kigali continue to pay high prices for maize flour at 350 frw a kilogram (Kimironko market price), indicating that the crop is valuable.

My friend Eddie, an expert in Agricultural Economic suggests a comprehensive marketing strategy especially for maize and beans which are relatively easy to store. "In Eastern Province, there are Silos.

The government can either store the produce for the farmers until prices pick up or buy the maize at the price agreed, store and later sell to millers, and other consumers, that's the best way of protecting farmers without losing money" says Eddie adding that the profit made would cover administrative or handling costs.

While I totally agree with Eddie I wish to add that Rwanda Agriculture Development Authority(RADA )should have a comprehensive storage and marketing policy to increase farmers' incomes and promote food security.

RADA should be able to predict production out put of certain crops and have a post harvest preservation and marketing plan in advance and when necessary buy storable food from the farmers for future retribution. That way farmer will be encouraged to plant the same crop without fear of loss.

In a related development diary farmers in the same district of Nyagatare have a problem marketing their milk. The price of milk is very low at 100 frw per liter, yet it is sold at 300 frw when transported to Kigali.

According to Mugisha, a cattle keeper in Rwimiyaga sector, the milk collection center takes a small percentage of the milk produced especially during the rain season, making it difficult for farmers to meet their obligations.

The major problem faced by these farmers is repayment of loans obtained to improve pasture and purchase diary cattle.

What is apparent is that there is lack of effective marketing policies, and if they are there, they are not efficiently implemented. On local markets you find all sorts of imported diary products, right from packed UHT milk, fresh milk, yoghurt, cheese, and many more.

With proper management and technical assistance from Rwanda Animal Resources Development Authority, local farmers' cooperative societies could invest in milk processing projects.

The farmers would then get ready market for their milk, higher prices and meaningful dividends from the cooperatives shares. Protect the farmer to ensure food security.

The Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives, Mr Stephen Wassira told Parliament in Dodoma last week that the Government expects to harvest 12.8 million tonnes of various types of foods in the 2010/11 season against the national demand of 11.4 million tonnes.

That accounts for a surplus of 1.4 million tonnes - the highest in recent years during when Tanzania had to import thousands of tonnes of foods primarily rice.

Of the 12.8 million tonnes of food, some 7.7 tonnes constitute cereals and 5.1 million tonnes are non-cereal foods.

However, Minister Wassira was quick to point out that some pockets of the country may face a deficit, but it will be taken care of by the national surplus.

Some of the expected deficit districts will include Dodoma, Longido, Iringa rural, Shinyanga rural, Meatu, Kishapu, Kwimba, Lindi rural Nanyumbu and Mwanga.

This good news on the food surplus will also have direct impact on inflation because food constitutes a vital item in calculating Tanzania's inflation as it accounts for 60 per cent of the 'basket' weighted items used to calculate inflation.

A recent report has showed an inflation drop for May 2010 was a two-and-half year low - by 1.8 per cent to 7.9 per cent in the year ended April 2010 and May 2010, thanks to lower food prices as a result of good harvest.

"The decrease under consideration was highly attributed to the decrease of food prices by 2.1 per cent," confirms the National Bureau of Standard (NBS) in its June 2010 report. As a result of this, the Government has said it will lift the ban on food exports particularly cereals and beans to Zambia, the Democratic of Congo and Kenya.

These have been the destination of contraband food exports from Tanzania as they were banned to safeguard the internal food security.

However, regular export procedures will be followed.

This move is expected to benefit millions of smallholder farmers because they will be able to sell their produce at market value rather than dictated low prices.