Tanzania snags South Sudan as market for maize, cereals

 

By APOLINARI TAIRO

The Cereals and Other Produce Board of Tanzania (CPB) will start exporting maize and other cereals to South Sudan after securing market in the country.

Following a visit to Juba last month, the CPB director general Dr Anselm Moshi said they would export about 200,000 tonnes of cereals, starting with 60,000 tonnes of white sorghum this season.

In their visit in June, CBP officials met with the South Sudan’s Ministry of Trade officials, who agreed to open the market to agricultural produce from Tanzania to enable farmers and traders between the two countries to trade.

CPB is now in discussions with the World Food Programme over 50,000 tonnes of maize it wants to sell in the next harvesting season, to be distributed in South Sudan.

Already, the CBP has entered into a partnership with Kapari Ltd to open warehouses in Nairobi, for storing 102,000 tonnes of maize in transit to South Sudan, said Dr Moshi.

The CPB is set to buy some 298,000 tonnes of maize, sorghum, rice beans, and sunflower seeds from farmers in the 2021/2022 harvest season for export to South Sudan and Kenya.

A Tsh7.5 billion ($3.2 million) agreement was signed recently between CBP and the Mombasa based Grain Industries Ltd to purchase 144,000 tonnes of grains from Tanzania for sale in Kenya and South Sudan.

Minister for Agriculture Prof Adolf Mkenda said that Tanzania is now searching for maize and other grain markets in the region, taking advantage of the regional food markets. A team of is set to visit Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo to seek rice and maize markets.

Between 2019 and 2020, Tanzania produced 16.3 million tonnes of food crops, against local annual demand of about 13 million tonnes.

In the past two years, Tanzania has scrapped about 150 nuisance taxes and levies imposed on agricultural products, to attract more investments in food crops production for local and regional markets; boost competitiveness in agricultural production for most profitable food and cereal crops to secure export markets in regional states, mostly EAC partner states.