Dilemma of the Poor: Food or Fuel?

“…CONVERSION to ‘biofuels’ such as ethanol is scarcely helping with energy efficiency and is exacerbating a global food crisis.”

This is how a recent report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) explains about the current food crisis in the world.

“The combination of high petroleum prices and the desire to address environmental issues is currently at the forefront of the rapid expansion of the biofuel sector which in turn affects food prices in the world market,” it says in its March 2008 report available on its website.

Around the world, governments have enthusiastically embraced ethanol and other biofuels in recent years. Fuel from plant sources would, the thinking went, greatly reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and, for some countries, would also reduce reliance on foreign oil.

A number of countries in the world such as Brazil are behind the fast growth of biofuel industry and have put in place national policies that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (global warming).

Crops like sugarcane, wheat, maize, rapeseed, soybean, palm oil and other oil crops such as sunflower are used as raw materials in the process, FAO says in its World Food Situation report.

As a result, the boosting demand for agricultural crops used as feedstock in the production of alternative energy sources (e.g. biofuels) has resulted into food crisis whose pinch has already started being felt in many parts of the world.

Skeptics have long warned that ethanol is no miracle cure, offering slight energy gains at best. But in country after country, powerful farm lobbies have encouraged government subsidies for ethanol.

Now, however, the pendulum is swinging strongly in the other direction. For instance, recently the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler claimed that it was a ‘crime against humanity’ to divert corn from food to fuel.

This claim is now more vivid because of skyrocketing food prices and resulting unrest around the world. The enormous investment in biofuels in the U.S., the European Union, Canada and elsewhere, we are coming to see, is fuelling a food crisis in many poor countries.

These changes in food prices have not augured well with people in many countries in the world. In Mexico mass protests against high costs of food and in West Bengal, disputes over food-rationing have also erupted.

In Senegal, Mauritania and other parts of Africa people have been demonstrating in the streets against the increase in grain prices. In Haiti a ruling government was recently toppled following demonstrations against high food prices.

There might still be a major use for ethanol some day, and research should continue to see to it that the efforts to preserve the environment don’t negatively impact on the lives of billions of people across the globe.

A country like Brazil, for example, has made some good progress in using non-food plant material such as sugar-cane waste to produce ethanol. This is a very good initiative that other countries could emulate.

However, because prices are high, vast tracts of rainforest such as within the Amazon Forest are being razed down in the countries around the forest to make way for sugarcane farms.

It’s true that there are no short-cuts to reducing oil use and greenhouse gas emissions. But appropriate precautions must be taken beforehand.

Being part of the global village, Tanzania has not been left behind in promoting biofuels as an alternative source of energy.

Many companies especially from the west have shown interest in growing crops such as starch crops e.g. grains, maize and tubers like cassava, sugar plants such as sugarcane, cellulose plants (agriculture residues), and oil seed crops (like Jatropha, Oil palm)

The government through the Tanzania Investment Centre, with support from other stakeholders, is on the forefront in encouraging such efforts. For instance, it has planned to double sugar cane production between 2005 and 2010 and also to use all molasses resulting from the sugar industry’s projected production and the surplus cane for ethanol, among other initiatives.

Plans are underway to convert millions of hectares of arable land into biofuels and the justification for the promotion of large scale biofuels is that the country’s demand and price for petroleum products are growing rapidly at a rate of more than 30 percent per year.

While this is quite a positive move to the improvement of the country’s economy, it’s important to note that there are socio-economic and environmental prices that will be paid as a consequence.

“There are concerns that using land to grow fuel instead of food, rising grain prices, and the displacement of rural communities will lead to greater food insecurity in Tanzania,” says an environmentalist, Abdallah Mkindi.

In his paper titled ‘The Socio-economic and environmental impacts of a biofuels industry in Tanzania’ that he presented in July last year at a meeting in London, he says that forests, peatlands, mangroves and protected areas will be cut down, burned, and converted to farmland hence canceling any environmental benefit arising from biofuels.

Besides, with the National Biosafety Framework in place which allows trials for genetically modified (GM) crops, the GM industry may intend to use this as an opportunity to promote GM biofuels in Tanzania which could also negatively affect the environment and species therein.

He proposes a critical investigation on the socio-economic as well as the environmental impacts that the introduction of a biofuels industry will have in Tanzania before the idea is wholeheartedly embraced.

Most particularly, the impact on biodiversity, agriculture, food security and sovereignty, livelihoods, markets, land and territory with a specific focus on the impact on smallholder farmers and indigenous communities should be critically investigated, Mkindi suggests.

The following are some of the implications of biofuels production in the country;

Biofuels will increase pressure on Tanzania food supplies and further erode food sovereignty and that fact that Tanzania’s agriculture is predominantly rain-fed, with increased food shortages.

Converting the main sites identified as suitable for growing the biofuel crops will reduce land area devoted for food production so eroding local food security and sovereignty and further cause shortages.

Competition for land is also expected to be the outcome of the initiative because so far several investors have shown interest to invest on biofuels in the country.

According to Tanzania Investment Centre a Swedish company is looking for 400,000hectares of land for sugarcane production and Wami River basin has been identified for the purpose. This means that about a thousand small scale rice farmers could be evicted if the project goes through.

In Ruipa River valley, plans are underway to convert the basin into sugarcane plantation and hence over 1000 small scale rice farmers could be affected.

Promotion of Jatropha in the so called degraded land in Engaruka and Manyara and rice production in Usangu basin is forcing out the pastoralists out of their land.

Biofuels production in the country is also expected to cause conflict over water sources. Areas identified suitable for biofuels production are adjacent to rivers which small scale farmers depend on.

Large scale biofuels production will divert most of the water into their plantation, hence depriving small scale farmers’ access to water.

In Usangu basin, a thousand farmers were evicted and the river which is supplying water to their farms was diverted to an investor’s farm.

These, according to Mkindi, are some of the likely consequences of biofuels production and which he thinks thorough investigation is needed so as to ascertain the good and bad of the initiative to the country, people and the environment before it gets into a full swing.

As we have seen examples from other areas in the world, the rush for biofuels so as to save the environment and also the demand for self sufficiency in terms of fuel supplies by countries has turned into a mixed blessing.

Besides the socio-economic and environmental effects, production of biofuel like ethanol has caused more farmers to switch from food to fuel production. This is also likely to happen in Tanzania and the result will definitely be very detrimental.

Again, ample evidence has proved that though the major end result of the switch to biofuels was the protection of the environment, in the long run biofuels production contributes to environmental degradation in terms of large scale monoculture farming, deforestation, and emission of greenhouse gases during farming and processing.

So, all these should make us thing twice about the initiative. Yes we badly need affordable fuel and at the same time protect our environment but this shouldn’t be out of desperation with little attention to the socio-economic and environmental effects of biofuels production.

This Open Access will Deplete our Fisheries

DESPITE numerous efforts by the government, illegal fishing in our lakes and Indian Ocean coast waters has continued to be rampant and even intensified to the extent of threatening the existence of our fishery resources.

Every other day there are reports about the use of banned fishing methods such as dynamite fishing, poisoning, and use of nets with small holes and other prohibited gears.

Besides, the number of fishing vessels and fishermen, in many if not all water bodies, is increasing by day exerting more pressure on our already over-exploited fishery resources.

These problems are compounded by the fact that there is still no effective mechanism of checking new entrants into fishing business and as a result licensing of more fishing vessels and fishermen than the stocks available has been commonplace.

The Director of Fisheries, Dr. Geofrey Nanyaro, recently admitted that depletion of prawns (along the Tanzania’s coast of the Indian Ocean) was associated with too many fishing companies as compared to available stocks.

“The number of fishing permits issued didn’t correspond with the amount of stocks available in the ocean hence depletion,” he said.

He cited other reasons as unrealistic stock statistics, environmental destruction due to the application of crude methods such as the using of heavy chains and inappropriate nets all of which pose a threat to sustainable utilization of the fishery resources.

Consequently, Dr. Nanyaro said, the government recently had to suspend commercial trawling for prawns until next year to allow multiplication because harvesting level per season dropped from 1, 500 to only 300 tons.

Commercial trawling for prawns (white, giant, tiger, brown and flower) in Tanzania is carried-out in the Coast region mainly in Bagamoyo, Rufiji and Kisiju.

Some trawlers were reportedly using heavy chains so that they sank deeper in the mud where prawns are found.

“When the chains vibrate, both small and big size prawns jump into the net. Such methods destroy breeding grounds,” the Director of Fisheries noted.

According to him, stock assessment survey on prawns will start soon to determine the state of recovery before March next year which is the beginning of the next fishing season.

However, sources from the fishing industry are skeptical over this saying that the recovery period of stocks could take up to ten years because trawlers have over-harvested the fish stocks and destroyed breeding and feeding areas.

Similar cases have also been reported in Lake Victoria which is the second largest fresh water lake in the world and which earns Tanzania billion of shillings every year in terms of export of fish fillets.

Sometime in May this year, President Jakaya Kikwete while in Mwanza expressed his concerns over the increasing acts of over fishing and illegal fishing in Lake Victoria which, according to him, posed a threat to the future of the lake’s fishery resources.

“Over fishing is posing a great threat. Reports show that the number of fishermen has gone up from 51, 935 in 2002 to 98,015 last year,” he revealed.

Fishing vessels operating in the lake have also increased from 15,434 to 29,730 during the period, he added.

He said this shortly after officially inaugurating a new fish-processing plant that is owned by Tanzania Fisheries Development Company Limited (TFDC) a subsidiary of the National Investment Company Limited (NICOL).

“I really wish these findings were wrong. But this is the reality,” said the President, expressing his deepest concern over the future of the lake and its fisheries.

President Kikwete further said that the size of fish being caught was also worrisome, pointing out that of late Nile Perch species coming out of the lake weighs between 2 and five 5 kilogrammes as compared to 15 and 45 kilogrammes some years back. The president said some unscrupulous fishermen still use illegal fishing gear and practices such as poisoning, outlawed nets and dynamites.

“Worse still recent research findings have it that Nile perch catches were down to 375,400 last year from 750,000 tons in 2004,” he said adding:

“This is indeed disappointing.”

He thus directed the Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Development, John Pombe Magufuli, to see to it that strategies for reversing the trend were drawn up and implemented promptly.

I don’t doubt Magufuli’s ability to deal with such problems. It’s only a few months since he was appointed to head the ministry but some success has already started being realized in many parts of the country.

So far Tanzania has made a swift move to restore order in fishing industry which includes the impounding of illegal fishing gears, unseaworthy boats, revocation of fishing licenses and stopping the fishing of endangered fish species.

The massive police dragnet carried out in recent past saw 133 suspected culprits being netted and apprehended in the lakeside town of Mwanza some of whom have already been sentenced to imprisonment.

There is an on-going exercise of cracking down on foreign fishing vessels that are fishing on Tanzanian waters illegally. The operation also involves our Navy as far as border patrol is concerned.

“Neither the government nor the citizens are benefiting from fishing industry in the country. Its better we leave these fishes in water,” said Magufuli as quoted in the media recently adding:
“We have (even) jailed a CCM ward chairman in Musoma for two years and a person from a neighbouring country for eight years for illegal fishing we are not afraid of anyone,” he added.

Early this month Magufuli disclosed that the government decided to cancel licenses held by 69 registered foreign fishing vessels operating in the Indian Ocean as part of efforts to control unregulated fishing in Tanzanian waters and increase revenue in the form of license fees.

However, it’s important to note that the problem is quite bigger for the minister or the ministry alone. Our water bodies are too extensive making it hard to control the number of entrants into the fishing industry.

Tanzania isn’t the only country in the world facing such a problem as over fishing is common all across the world.

It’s an undeniable fact that fishing represents the major contribution to the economies of many countries, both directly as food and indirectly in the production of meal and oil for animal feed.

The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) reveals that the fishery sector contributes more than five percent to GDP in Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal and Seychelles.

“Fish is also a major source of protein for many poor people. From 1973 to 1990, fisheries supplied some 20 percent of the animal protein intake of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa,” UNEP says in its 2002 State of the Environment and Policy Retrospective report.

According to UNEP, though statistics show the world’s aggregate catch of fish has grown over time, this growth has come to an end mainly due to over-fishing whereby fish are caught faster than they can reproduce.

“In many areas, the world’s oceans have reached their maximum level of production and production may not be sustainable under the present circumstances,” UNEP notes.

UNEP attributes open access to fishing in most fisheries as one of the major causes of depletion of the fishery resources whereby the number of fishermen has more than doubled worldwide.

“In most developing countries, the poor have no choice but to glean the last of the resource,” UNEP explains in the report.

The UN environmental agency says that free and open access encourages over fishing with fishermen tending to catch as much fish as they can without taking care to maintain the fish stock.

It’s worth noting that the essential feature of a renewable resource such as fish (capable of regenerating after harvesting), is that its stock is not fixed and can be increased as decreased depending on the nature of utilization.

In their book ‘Economics of Natural Resources and The Environment’ writers David Pearce and Kerry Turner cautions that there is always a potential of making a renewable resource disappear if utilization is not controlled.

“The potential of over-harvesting a renewable resource is significant: It is quite easy to make a renewable resource disappear. This will obviously happen if the rate of harvest exceeds the rate of natural growth of the resource persistently,” they say.

The writers attribute over-fishing to open access (a situation in which no one owns the resource and access is open to all) but add that other factors such as low operation costs (including taxes by governments) also attract new entrants into the fishing industry.

It’s obvious that there is no any water body that could be said to be without owner. All lakes, oceans and rivers are under territorial borders of countries.

However, poor regulation such as unregulated or easy issuing of licenses (as we have seen in the Tanzanian case earlier on), expansiveness of water bodies and many more such factors render the fishery resources almost open to everyone.

And as an English saying goes-everybody’s property is nobody’s, the common practice has been over-exploitation and abuse of the resources thereby posing a threat of extinction of the fisheries.

Regulation in forms of licenses, taxes and other restrictions are meant to enable countries to avoid such a situation in time before the situation gets out of hand and it’s high time that countries sharing transboundary water resources joined hands to address the problem.

Unrestricted exploitation of resources by everyone with no or poor regulation is more likely to lead to resources’ extinction hence damage the welfare of everyone and imposing an irreversible cost on future generations.

Towards an Agrarian Revolution with a Hand Hoe

“TODAY, the efforts of our farmers are thwarted by a lack of access to good seed, fertilisers, and

financing. Some 95 percent of African agriculture is dependent on rain-fall, and farmers lose an average of 40 percent of their crops after harvest.”

This is how the former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, summarized the challenges that the farmers in the African continent are facing as far as green revolution is concerned.

He made the remarks recently in the US during the launching of an alliance between the US government under its US Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra).

The new partnership aims to invest in Africa’s inadequate infrastructure, as well as developing new seeds and fertilisers and Annan, who heads Agra, seized the opportunity to call for green revolution to curb the current food crisis in the continent.

“We need better technologies for efficient use of water; improved market infrastructure; and paved roads so farmers can get their harvest to market,” he said.

This could really be regarded as a great boost to African agriculture which for many years has totally failed to pull out from abject poverty millions of farmers in the continent.

After all, the situation is even worsening everyday with agriculture being reduced into nothing other than a typical guess work forcing the peasants to grow poorer and poorer at the end of each day.

For instance, Annan noted that there had been 30 years of silent hunger in Africa, whereby farmers exported food in the late 1960s but now only produced a quarter of the world average per acre.

Though many factors can be attributed to this trend, poor or lack of investment in the sector has played a big role.

Some African countries can afford buying modern army artilleries and fund endless wars with their neighbours but not simple tractors or even fertilizer for their people.

A country like Ethiopia is always facing acute food shortage but it affords sending its troops in Somalia for years now.

Other countries have also paid little attention to the sector despite it being their economies’ mainstay.

In many countries spending in military and national security areas has always been much more than the agricultural sector which employs more than 80 percent of the general population in the continent.

It’s only last week that some members of parliament questioned our government’s seriousness in improving agriculture in the country during discussions over the 2008/9 budget estimates for the Ministry of Livestock Development and Fisheries.

They said that the Tshs. 41 billion budget for the 2008/9 financial year was ‘too little’ to lay any comprehensive plans to modernize the agricultural sector and fishing industry that employ over 80 percent of Tanzanians.

Last year the ministry was allocated Tshs. 49 billion more than this year’s Tshs. 41 billion forcing the MPs to doubt the government’s commitment and seriousness towards the sectors.

The MPs also urged the government to establish a special fund to be used to empower graduates from agricultural and fisheries’ institutes to take the lead in revolutionalising the sectors.

“Let’s give our youth a challenge. Through this strategy we shall change and improve the economy of our people,” said Kingunge Ngombale-Mwiru.

According to him, agriculture is second most important sector after education in bringing about sound economic change and improving people’s lives.

“It gives us food. It employs 80 percent of our people and it’s the source of raw materials for our industries. But still it’s the sector that seems to be neglected,” the legislator pointed out.

Though the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Cooperatives has been allocated Tshs. 460 billion this financial year from Tshs. 379 billion in the previous year (an increase of 21 percent) much is still to be desired for the sector to improve.

For many years agriculture in Tanzania has been suffocated by poor investment forcing the farmers to continue relying on crude tools such as hand hoes which todate limit their ability to produce.

This is despite the fact that Tanzania is ranked third next to Sudan and Ethiopia in terms of livestock population in the whole of Africa, having about 40 million animals that could be used in boosting our agriculture.

The country which is also richly endowed with water bodies still relies on rain fed agriculture for over 90 percent.

Recently the Minister for Water and Irrigation, Prof. Mark Mwandosya told the parliament that out of the 29.4 million hectares suitable for irrigation farming, it’s only 289,245 hectares that are under that kind of farming so far.

No wonder food shortages in some parts of the country have remained to be commonplace and grains like rice, wheat and items like sugar are still being imported from abroad.

Sometime last year our Agriculture, Food and Cooperatives Minister, Stephen Wasira, was quoted in the media as saying that Tanzania needed to embark on agricultural revolution so as to do away with bottlenecks of non-productivity in varieties of crops.

But what kind of an agrarian revolution can we embark on in such circumstances?

Tanzanian agriculture is still mainly subsistence farming and is characterized by low level of technology use and poor management leading to low crop yields. Small scale farming, which is dominant in the country, has totally failed to fully utilize the large land resource available.

The 2001 Agricultural Sector Development Strategy says that out of the 44 million hectares classified as suitable for agriculture, only 10.1 million hectares or just 23 percent is under cultivation.

This means that much of arable land in the country is still lying idle.

A report by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security titled Agricultural Mechanisation in Tanzania of 2005 acknowledges that improvement in the agricultural sector is paramount in poverty reduction.

“Commercialising smallholder agriculture and accelerating its growth rate is essential in increasing agricultural production as a means of pulling the majority of the rural poor out of abject poverty,” it says.

The report, which was prepared by one R. M. Shetto of the ministry’s Irrigation and Technical Services Division, adds that given the generally abundant land resource, efforts to increase agricultural production should include both technologies to expand utilized land area and intensification of the existing cultivated areas.

“This may be achieved through mechanisation and adoption of other improved technologies such as improved seed, use of fertilizers, agro-processing and accessibility to markets,” it further adds.

It explains that agricultural mechanisation includes three main power sources i.e. human, animal and mechanical.

“Under the tropical heat, a healthy adult using a hand hoe can work about 0.5 hectare per season thus limiting the area under cultivation to 2 hectares only for an average family of four adults,” the report reads in part adding:

“On the other hand, a family owning a pair of draught animals can manage 5-8 hectares per season while a 60-70 horse power tractor can manage more than 80 hectares in a season.”

Thus, it says, mechanisation enhances human capacity, leading to intensification and increased productivity as a result of timely planting, weeding, harvesting, post harvesting handling and accessibility to markets.

It therefore has the potential to turn idle land into productive land for national economic growth, food self-sufficiency, industrial growth and employment, leading to poverty reduction.

“Tanzania needs to mount a long-term effort to develop a modern agriculture, mechanisation playing a leading role,” it concludes.

It’s true that the cost of mechanical mechanisation could be far above the reach of many Tanzanians but if Tanzania begins at least by adding the number of animals used in agriculture this could greatly boost our agriculture.

Animals could relieve farmers in Africa of a big burden in carrying out their agricultural activities
According to the report, there are over 14 million hand hoes in use (by March 2005) and the number of oxen and animal drawn ploughs is approximately 1.2 million and 570,000 respectively out of the 40 million animal population.

This means there is still a great potential of adding this simple and affordable technology to many farmers in the country and thereby increase their agricultural productivity.

A country like China, which faced severe food shortages in 1960s and 1970s, came out of the predicament through the proper use of such simple and affordable technologies such as the use of water buffaloes.

Today the country, whose total arable land is only 14 percent of its total size, manages to feed its 1.2 billion people and also exports food to other parts of the world.

Again, heavy investment could be made possible though government subsidies and formation of strong farmers’ cooperatives or SACCOs that would enable farmers purchase things like tractors.

For instance, the report says that there were only about 9,500 tractors that were operational countrywide in 2005 and another 6000 were broken down although repairable.

“On the average the number of ploughs has been increasing at an average of 20,000 units per year while 200 to 300 are imported annually. The country needs more than 3000 animal drawn ploughs and 1800 tractors annually in order to cater for farm power needs in agricultural growth,” the report discloses.

The sad story is that over the past 20 years, tractor sales in the country have drastically dropped from 1,143 tractors in 1985 to 274 in 2002, according to the report, mainly because of high prices.

Lack of credits, stringent borrowing conditions from commercial banks and low crop prices make tractors unaffordable to many of our farmers.

The report continues to tell the sad story. While the price of a 70 horse power tractor with plough, harrow and trailer was sold at Tshs. 460,000/- in 1984, it is over Tshs. 35,000,000/- now.

On the other hand the price of many crops has not changed much over the years and in many cases the prices have declined in real terms taking into consideration the massive devaluation of the Tanzanian shilling and inflation.

For instance in 1985, a kilo of maize was Tshs. 5.41/- (equivalent of USD 0.318) whereas it's now sold at Tshs. 120.00 per kilo now (2005) which is equivalent to USD 0.113.

“While in 1985 a farmer could purchase a 70 Horsepower tractor with implements by selling 870 bags (of 100kgs) of maize, now he has to part with 3,000 bags to acquire the same tractor,” the report explains.

Now how do we expect a country to undergo green revolution under such circumstances in which farmers can only afford hand hoes?