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The Longuza Teak Plantation’s squatter project has helped to reduce the cost of tending young trees while using the same land to produce food crops for peripheral villagers.

The manager, Mr Abdallah Mchomvu told The Citizen here yesterday that under the programme known as ‘Taungya,’ villagers are allowed to intercrop food crops with young trees in harvested blocks and let the trees grow in clean plots as the peasants weed their crops.

Mr Mchomvu said the system, in use since 2006/07 farming season, has enabled villagers to harvest maize and beans while reducing labour costs for weeding the precious hard wood trees, originally from India but Tanzania now has the best species.

A total of 312.3 hectares have been replanted since 2006/07 when harvesting started.

“Cross planting increased from 30.0 hectares in 2006/07 to 92.3 hectares in 2007/08,” he said adding that for the 2008/09 season 190 hectares were planted while another 100 hectares were under preparation.

However, the delay to fell trees since 2006 by companies that won harvest tenders had seriously retarded the replanting schedule. Some 20,900 cubic metres of tree have been allocated as allowable cropping for 2009/10.

“Twenty seven people from neighbouring villages were allocated 1,350 cubic metres for harvesting,” Mr Mchomvu said. However, they failed to pay the cost and ended selling their permits to big companies.

The villagers also are allowed to collect firewood, poles for construction of houses, herbs for traditional medicine and are given priority as casual labours

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High interest on loans are making lives of civil servants in Mara Region much harder, regional administrative secretary Chrisant Rubunga, has said.

Mr Rubunga cautioned civil servants in the region not to take huge loans over and above their legal income, stating the civil service regulations forbade them to secure loans exceeding one third of their monthly salary.

In a statement circulated to municipal, town and district executive directors in the region, Mr Rubunga said big loans greatly affected behaviour and discipline of the civil servants at workplaces.

Complaints had been received from civil servants’families of living below the poverty line because their bread winners’ salaries are being deducted to service the loans.

The Government would take punitive measures to uphold discipline amongst indebted civil servants in the region, including denying them promotion and annual increment, he cautioned.

Many civil servants admitted securing huge loans, and asked the Government to raise their salaries to enable them meet the high cost of living.

Source – The Citizen

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Tanzania’s services receipts have decreased by $48 million to $1.91 billion due to a drop in transportation earnings, according to the Bank of Tanzania.

The nearly three per cent slump in overall services receipts during the year was an outcome of the impact of the global recession that affected both advanced and developing economies.

During the 12-month period ending June 2009, Tanzania’s service payments increased by nearly 10 per cent to $1629.6 million. BoT attributes the surge to increases in freight, travel and other business services.

BoT says in its July economic review report that transportation services earnings during the review period fell by 20.4 per cent. Earnings plummeted to $326.5 million from the $376.7 million level that was recorded at the end of June 2008 due to a drop in transit trade.

Apart from the economic crisis, transit trade in Tanzania was also adversely affected by congestion at the Dar es Salaam port. The port lost considerable business to its competitors in the region, notably Mombasa in Kenya and Beira in Mozambique.

Travel services, which account for about 60 per cent of total services receipts, increased slightly to $1,250.4 million from $1,228.7 million during the review period. The report says the small increase in travel receipts was an outcome of the recession that hit the US and UK, which are Tanzania’s major tourist source markets.

“The available statistics from the Immigration Department indicate that the number of tourist arrivals has decreased to 672,296 during July to May 2008/09 from 706,425 reported in the same period last year,” BoT notes in the report.

Receipts from communication, construction, insurance, financial, computer information, government, royalties, and personal and other business services declined to $276.3 million from $376.9 million.

Source – The Citizen

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Tanzania will soon have a national strategy to deal with oil spills in its waters, it was revealed yesterday.

The strategy will be known as the National Oil Spill Response Contingency Plan (NOSRCP).

The plan was made public during a workshop held in Dar es Salaam to discuss it as part of World Maritime Week 2009.

Its formulation is being coordinated by the Surface and Marine Transport Regulatory Authority (Sumatra), the director of transport services in the Ministry of Infrastructure Development, Dr William Nshama, told the stakeholders’ workshop.

When operational, it will deal with oil spills within 200 nautical miles of Tanzania’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and inland waters.

“The NOSRCP will be an important tool for responding to an oil spill or other marine pollution hazards within Tanzania’s waters,” Dr Nshama said.

Sumatra director general Israel Sekirasa said the plan sought to initiate a coordinated approach on how various stakeholders could respond to oil spills.

“It also aims at mapping the country by underlining the areas that may be seriously affected by oil spills�the utmost aim is to know which areas deserve the most attention in case of an oil spill,” he said.

Tanzania’s territorial waters are among the busiest shipping lanes in Africa, but the country has never recorded a serious oil spill incident.

It is estimated there are 50 ships in the major shipping lanes off Tanzania’s coast at any given time.

An average of nine oil tankers, with capacities ranging from 50,000 to 250,000 tonnes, sail through the shipping lanes daily.

Source – The Citizen

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Mererani gemstone mines in Manyara Region could be flooded again should the area experience abnormally heavy El Nino rains later this year.

Miners operating there said they were worried about the situation because of an abandoned pit-turned-drainage tunnel said to be responsible for the previous disaster in March last year that has not been unblocked.

During the tragedy nearly 80 people working underground were killed after the mine pits were flooded by heavy rains.

Reports from the mines, located 60 kilometres south east of Arusha, have it that there is a heightened concern that a similar tragedy could be repeated should the El Nino rains fall.

A meeting convened by small miners last week to discuss the issue was told that safety measures proposed after last year’s disaster have not been put in place.

These included unblocking a drainage tunnel that is said to have been responsible for flooding the pits during heavy rains when miners were inside.

The open tunnel, commonly known as D’Souza, has remained blocked for many years. When a heavy storm hit the area on March 28, 2009 its walls collapsed spilling water into several mine pits.

One of the safety measures proposed to stop the recurrence of a similar tragedy was unblocking of the tunnel so that it drains rain water downstream instead of collecting large volumes of water.

A small scale miner, Mr Mathew Ngowi, cautioned the mining community at Mererani not to ignore warnings about a possible disaster to accompany the El Nino rains.

Recently, meteorological experts announced that the country is likely to experience abnormally heavy rains associated with El Nino. This is a weather phenomenon spurred by the warming up of water over south Pacific.

Mr Ngowi said the Mererani gemstone mines still lacked safety measures despite recurring disasters. Another major tragedy hit the area in April 1998 when about 100 people died as mines were flooded during El Nino rains.

He urged the pit owners to construct drainage trenches around their pits to ease the passage of water during heavy rains. Most of the victims are normally pit miners known as Wana-Apolo.

But another mine operator. Mr Salim Ngoya, blamed the Government for doing little on the Mererani disasters, including providing safety measures for all mine operators.

The secretary of the Manyara Regional Miners Association (Marema), Mr Abubakar Mollel, said at least Sh1 billion would be needed to construct a drainage from the D�Souza open pit.

The Manyara regional commissioner, Mr Henry Shekiffu, has been quoted as blaming gemstone pit owners for blocking the drainage from the abandoned open pit. This resulted in the catastrophic flooding of the mines last year.

The controversial pit belonged to one D’Souza. He was among the first entrepreneurs to start commercial mining of tanzanite soon after the rare gemstone was discovered at Mererani in the late 1960s.

Source – The Citizen

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Tanzania’s exports to the European Union (EU) dropped by 56.471 million euros (Sh104 billion) last year to widen the trade gap between the country and the 27-nation European bloc.

Total exports to the EU were valued at 382.76 million euros in 2007 (Sh708 billion), but dropped to 326.29 million euros (Sh604 billion) last year, according to statistics from the EU Delegation office in Dar es Salaam.

While exports decreased, imports from the region went up by a significant 74 million euros (about Sh137 billion) in 2008 to widen the trade gap between Tanzania and the EU to 478.246 million euros (Sh885 billion).

The trade deficit was 347.769 million euros (Sh643 billion) in 2007.

Tanzania’s imports from the EU reached 730.53 million euros (Sh1.4 trillion) in 2007 before increasing to 804.536 million euros (Sh1.5 trillion) last year.

Tanzania and other East African Community (EAC) member states mainly export agricultural products to Europe. Their major imports are machinery and technical equipment.

Mr Marcos Sampablo, the EU delegation�s trade attach� in Tanzania, says the EAC has failed to exploit the EU market opportunities due to the region�s limited production capacity.

Another major trade barrier are the stringent market regulation rules in the EU, especially on food.

“EAC countries suffer from supply constraints,” he told The Citizen by email.

He said finalisation of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) would help the EAC to export more to the EU market by addressing the region’s supply constraints.

“It is out of this that the EU proposed to include in the EPA negotiations issues of trade in services, investment, competition, customs and trade facilitation and government procurement,” Mr Sampablo said.

The issue of customs and trade facilitation for example will help EAC to simplify customs procedures and reduce unnecessary costs and delays, he added.

Unloading cargo in an African port needs an average of 18 signatures but the same requires only three signatures in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

It is estimated that it is more expensive to transport a container from Mombasa to Uganda than it is to transport the same container from Singapore to Mombasa.

Source – The Citizen

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Tanzania will face a deficit of food crops of 1,313,199 tonnes in 2009/10, according to the Regional Agricultural Trade Intelligence Network.

The bulk of the shortage will involve cereals, the network says in a preliminary food forecast report.

Some areas in the country are already facing food shortages following a sharp decline in food production in the 2008/09 season due to unfavourable rains.

The country produced a total of 5,265,309 tonnes of cereals in the 2008/9 season against the requirement of 6,578,508 tonnes in the 2009/10 consumption year.

During the production year, the country produced a total of 10,921,536 tonnes of food against 10,578,196 tonnes required in the 2009/10 consumption year.

In effect, a net food situation involving the 2008/09 production is such that a self-sufficiency ratio of 103 percent or a little surplus of 343,340 tonnes is attainable.

Compared to previous season, production decline has been observed in sorghum 20 per cent, maize 4 per cent and rice 4 per cent and pulses 4 per cent, due to poor rains in respect of late onset, inappropriate distribution and early cessation, dismal rains in some bimodal areas, soil degradation and pest and vermin prevalence.

Analysis of carry-over stocks shows that about 462,870 tonnes was available from three different sources such as, private stocks 121,560 tonnes, public stocks/SGR 109,876 tonnes and farm retention 231,435 tonnes.

Adding the carry over stocks to the below mentioned production surplus a total of 806,210 tonnes will be available over and above the amount satisfying national requirement for year 2009/10.

Based on this Preliminary forecast, the 2008 Vuli season contributed 13 per cent only of total production compared to normal 18 per cent national perspective or 24 per cent only versus 32 per cent bimodal area perspective, showing a possible draw-down impact of about 518,359 tonnes.

At sub-national level, self- sufficient analysis warns of nine deficit regions. Furthermore, further warnings are focused to eight additional regions bearing pockets of food shortage.

Excluding Dar es Salaam, which is largely non-agricultural, the 17 regions bear vulnerable population in 61 districts. The identified vulnerable areas will need to be subjected to an in-depth vulnerability assessment for necessary intervention.

Observant to current global food crisis manifested through soaring food prices, the produced food during 2008/09 should be prudently managed to avoid adverse food shortage due to excessive trading and �misuse� for nonfood purposes.

Measures should be taken to improve utilisation potential of a broader basket of foods including sorghum, bulrush millet, cassava, banana and sweet potatoes to enhance food availability.

Innovative practices such as blending should be pursued to include such crops. Regional integration is an area that may be adversely or favorably exploited by member countries and this should be explored for the interest of Tanzania.

Blanket policy statements of non-exportation protectionism have not always shown a positive impact. A serious study should be carried out in this area to find out what is taking place on the ground regarding food without borders.

The government planned to purchase in local market a total of 165,000 tonnes of cereals, of which 160 tonnes will be maize and 5 tonnes sorghum in the current financial year.

Source – The Citizen

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