Tanzania now turns to Arusha and Njombe for production of wheat kernels

By Valentine Oforo On Jul 9, 2023

There are plans to empower farms in Arusha Region to produce over 1350 tons of wheat kernels within the 2023 agricultural season.

A directive from the Ministry to the Tanzania Agricultural Seeds Agency instructs that the new ‘Sifa’ variety of wheat seedlings should be churned out from Ngaramtoni Estates, located a few kilometers from the Arusha City Center.

The Minister of Agriculture Hussein Bashe explained that this should be within the country’s efforts to start producing enough seeds, in addressing shortages of wheat and related farm inputs in Tanzania.

Bashe made the statement during a special tour of the wheat seeds project at the Arusha-based seed farm, where he divulged plans to set aside ample tracts of land to produce different varieties of wheat seeds.

The Minister used the occasion to also instruct the Tanzania Agricultural Seeds Agency (ASA) to immediately float tenders for the installation of irrigation schemes to feed water into more than 200 hectares of the project so as to speed up production at the farm.

The Tanzania Agricultural Seeds Agency’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Sophia Kashenge, revealed that ASA was also working to establish another large farm to produce wheat seeds in the Makete District of Njombe within the Southern Highlands.

“The proposed farming estate in Njombe measures over 1,000 acres with the envisaged production output of between 2,500 to 3,000 tons of wheat kernels per season,” she unveiled.

Despite being an important food and commercial crop in the country, wheat remains a scarce commodity in Tanzania as its production has always been plummeting.

As it happens the production of wheat in Tanzania stagnates at 100,000 metric tons per year, at the moment.

However, the country’s wheat needs keep rising above 1 million metric tons in a year, which means there is a deficit of more than 900,000 metric tons annually.

In that case Tanzania is forced to import over 90 percent of the country’s annual wheat requirements from overseas.