Page 35 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 18

Food Health

to make compost with the plants Janet Maro contradicts that. ‘In the
they cut in their fields. We also teach Mlali Region, there were projects
them to do mixed cropping and to in which they gave the farmers
make extracts from plants that grow parcels of land to grow tomatoes.
in their surroundings in order to It went really well for a while and
control crop pests and diseases. The they produced a huge quantity of
most common pest, for example, is tomatoes, but this year things went
the aphid. You can make an extract wrong. The price of a bucket of
of Lantana camara, a shrub that tomatoes ranged between two and
grows in almost every village in three Euros. Nowadays, because
Tanzania, to control the aphids,’ says of the overproduction, you have to
Janet Maro. consider yourself lucky if you get 40
cents. Now, the farmers can no lon-
‘We also trained farmers in a region ger afford those expensive fertilizers
where they were given government and chemicals.’
subsidies to purchase fertilizer.
After our training, there were many ‘And I haven’t even started to men-
farmers with good results who tion the environmental damage and
questioned why they should still go the deterioration in soil fertility that
into town to buy expensive syn- these projects cause. The govern-
thetic fertilizer, as they can have a ment has asked us to train farmers
good harvest and can fight pests because the quality and quantity
with resources that are available of the water from the Mzinga and
in their own fields. Those farmers Ruvu Rivers have considerably wors-
returned their vouchers for subsi- ened because of the government’s
dized fertilizer to the government. agricultural projects. They want to
The government has now also come save the situation before it is too late
knocking on our door, asking us to and have seen that the projects of
train farmers.’ SAT have a much better impact on
the environment.’
Choosing between grandmother
and industry Even the United Nation’s former
Special Rapporteur for the Right for
‘Doing nothing and thinking that Food, Olivier De Schutter, stresses
you can continue with what your the importance of more research
grandmother grew, is a guaranteed and investment in agro-ecological
catastrophe’, says Kinyua M’Mbijj- methods in a report in 2011.
ewe from Syngenta. ‘The reason we
have hunger in Africa is that there According to FAO figures, more
are insufficient agricultural inputs.’ than 80 percent of the worldwide
food is produced by small-scale
Abel Lyimo, the CEO of the Tan- farmers. If they cannot afford
zanian Rural Urban Development commercial inputs, they can still
Initiatives, a NGO that focusses make progress with agro-ecological
on the development of small-scale methods. The methods are not im-
farmers through the private sector, mediately patentable and therefore
thinks the same: ‘Tanzania is one the industry treats them shabbily.
of the countries with the lowest An unfortunate consequence of this
use of farm inputs and the lowest is that insufficient research is being
productivity in the world. There is done into such methods.
a link between proper use of inputs
and productivity. Use only half, and
you’ll produce only half.’

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