Tanzania: Preserving the Soil and Reaping Greater Harvests

Fezeka Community Garden , Gugulethu , Cape Town.

Morogoro, Tanzania — Smallholder farmer Peter Mcharo, from Morogoro Region in eastern Tanzania, has a reason to smile. His fields are full of green, healthy maize plants, he has richer soil and he spends less time farming now than he did two years ago.
Viewed as one of the major solutions to food insecurity and as a mechanism to adapt to climate change in Africa, conservation agriculture (CA) is giving Tanzanian smallholder farmers like Mcharo better harvests as the country faces an acute food shortage.

Minister of Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives Christopher Chiza urged farmers to use CA, as 47 districts in this East African nation face a serious food shortage. This is despite a 12 percent surplus recorded during the 2011/2012 harvests.
The regions affected include, Kilimanjaro, Lindi, Tanga, Mtwara, Coast, Iringa, Kagera, Mwanza and Singida.
But Mcharo, who is from Kibaigwa village, told IPS: "In my five seasons of using the system, I have confirmed that it is better to use conservation agriculture as my colleagues in the village cooperative have made a larger profit per half hectare (compared to when we) cultivated a bigger piece of land." Mcharo, and the 30 farmers in his village who belong to the Umoja (Unity in Swahili) cooperative, are all involved in CA.
They are among a number of farmers in the country who have benefited from a CA farming project since the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) introduced it here in 1998. The FAO-supported project, run by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives, has benefited some 4,000 smallholder farmers, in the central and northern regions of Morogoro, Kilosa, Mbeya, Arusha, Babati and Manyara.

According to a 2007 report written by Richard Shetto and Marietha Owenya in conjunction with the FAO and other partners titled "Conservation Agriculture as practiced in Tanzania - three case studies", agriculture is the basis of the country's economy. It accounts "for about half of both the gross domestic product and merchandise exports. Some 80 percent of the 34.5 million country population, especially those in rural and peri-urban areas, depend on agriculture for their livelihoods."
Conservation agriculture is a resource-efficient crop production practice that involves minimum or even zero mechanical disturbance of the soil, keeping the soil covered at all times - either by a growing crop or a dead mulch of crop residues - and using diversified crop rotation. In addition, the use of pesticides is reduced or avoided and biological control is encouraged.