The Minister for Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, Dr Charles Tizeba told the ‘Daily News’ that the government was making sure everybody engaging in food export business obtain export permits after submitting application to the authority.
“What we are doing is not new, we are insisting on the procedures, we ensure every person in this business follows rules and principles,” he noted.
According to Dr Tizeba, the reasons behind issuing permits are to control crop diseases, ensure monitoring of quantity of exported food so as to avoid shortage in the country and many other reasons. He said so far traders were applying for permits and that the business is going on as usual.
“We want people to follow procedures, and this is what they are doing, we are making a serious follow up and monitoring on the amount of food that is exported, we are doing this to avoid the shortage of food in the country,” he said.
Dr Tizeba said at the moment, Tanzania is the main source of grains in the region and that other countries with food shortage are eying at exporting food from the country.
On September 9, this year, Dr Tizeba said in Parliament that the government was set to export rice and maize in thirteen Southern African Development Community (SADC) and East African Community (EAC) member states currently hit by acute food shortages.
Dr Tizeba told MPs in the House that the state of food production in the country between 2015/16 and 2016/17 indicated that supply had surpassed demand by 23 per cent.
A combined production outlook for 2016/17 shows that there will be 16,172,841 tonnes of grains out of which 9,457,108 tonnes will be cereals and 6,715,733 tonnes will be non-cereals.
“For the country to be food secure, we need 13.12 million tonnes of which 8.2 million will consist of cereals and 4.8 million tonnes will be non-cereals,” the minister told the National Assembly.
This means Tanzania will have 3.02 million tonnes of excess produce. The minister explained that the government had secured funds from Poland to finance the capacity of the National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA) to a tune of 55 million US dollars.
He added that the agency will only be able to reserve 496,000 tonnes of the total production. In 2014, the government scrapped the export of traditional rice and maize to allow thorough assessment of Tanzania’s rice and maize production outlook.
The Minister said yesterday that after the government lifted the ban, it opened doors for traders to apply for food export permit and that those who meet the criteria have been offered permit to proceed with business.
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