The Indian Ocean Coastline of Tanzania, precisely the sea waters surrounding Zanzibar Islands, is assuming a new role of becoming a major producer of organic fertilizers in the country.
Seaweeds harvested from Unguja and Pemba Isles are the main raw materials used to manufacture environment friendly agricultural inputs from Zanzibar, a project which is about to be replicated on the mainland Tanzania from early 2025.
Steven Sillah is the Resident Director of Coastal Biotech Limited, the firm behind the USD 20 Million seaweeds fertilizer project, who explains the new development taking place in the Indian Ocean archipelago.
“So ultimately what we want to do is get rid of chemical fertilizers and replace them by organic fertilizers and one way to do that is by using seaweed to produce environment friendly farm inputs,” revealed Sillah.
As it happens, the entire world is now moving away from chemical inputs and adopting organically grown crops. Which means organic farming is the only lifeline for local growers.
Coastal BioTech Limited is a marine biotechnology entity whose research and innovation focuses on Macroalgae and bio-based solutions as a core component to the food and feed industry.
The company has just become a member of the Tanganyika Farmers Association and together with the TFA Coastal BioTech plans to construct another factory on the other side of the ocean on Tanzania mainland to produce more organic farm inputs from marine components.
But even with another plant on the mainland, they will still be sourcing the Mwani Seaweeds from Zanzibar. The question is why not harvest the marine raw materials from the even longer coastline striding, Tanga, Dar-es-Salaam all the way to Lindi?
“The seaweeds harvested from the golden beaches of Zanzibar are pure, constituting the real meaning of organic inputs because the water around the isles is less polluted,” explains Sillah.
“In adopting organic fertilizers, we could reduce the costs for farmers by 236 dollars per acre. That is just on the input,” said the Coastal BioTech official, adding that with less chemical inputs the farm yields are bound to be even higher by over 35 percent,” he added.
Known locally as ‘Mwani,’ seaweeds, otherwise described as marine algae are primitive non-flowering photosynthetic Macrophytes occurring in tidal regions of seas and oceans that occupy 71 percent of the globe, and they are natural renewable resources.
Now the company is getting linked with the Tanganyika Farmers Association boasting a membership of more than 5000 local growers ranging from small landholders to large commercial farmers, with the new partnership targeting to develop large-scale integrated macro-algae and bio-based bio-refinery solutions for the production of bio-stimulants, bio-pesticides and feed additives.
The Executive Director of Tanganyika Farmers Association (TFA), Justin Shirima said with the new project planned for the mainland, Coastal BioTech is going to revolutionize the agriculture sector on these shores.
“Having originated in Germany, the firm operations are based on joint research programs with the science-oriented institutes of higher education based in Munich,” said Shirima.