TANZANIA’S INDUSTRIALISATION DOOMED UNLESS AGRIC IS OVERHAULED
DAR ES SALAAM - Professor Ibrahim Lipumba has said the dilapidated state of the agriculture sector in Tanzania will make industrialisation dreams difficult to realise.
Speaking in an interview with a local TV Station on Sunday, Prof Lipumba, an economist cum politician, said efforts must urgently be made to overhaul the agriculture sector whose growth is stagnating. Tanzania has launched an industrialisation drive as part of efforts to attain the middle income country status by 2020. But the agriculture sector is not doing well with the growth of the sector being below 4 per cent for more than 10 years now.
“Agriculture has been neglected for a long time now; we are not investing adequately in agricultural research; farm inputs do not reach farmers on time and extension services are poor or nonexistent,” Prof Lipumba, once an adviser to former President Ali Hassan Mwinyi, said.
The government has a special role to play in investing in agriculture, he noted.
Sadc countries agreed to allocate 10 per cent of their national budgets to the agriculture sector, but Tanzania has never honoured that agreement, Prof Lipumba, the chairman of a faction of the opposition party, CUF, added.
“We can learn from Asia where they made an agricultural revolution by focusing on small holders,” Prof Lipumba advised.
Speaking in the same TV interview the MP for Nzega urban, Hussein Bashe (CCM) said by focusing on industrialisation while neglecting agriculture Tanzania is repeating the mistakes it made in the 1970s and 1980s.
“What is even more pathetic is that the budget of agriculture is one of the least disbursed budgets in the country,” Bashe noted.