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Subsidies on farm inputs alone won’t trigger agrarian revolution
2006-09-08 09:14:56
By Editor
The incumbent administration has won the minds and hearts of development advocates for its resolve to provide immense push for agrarian reforms.
This has come in the form of a decisive decision by the government to treble appropriations for financing farm input subsidies from 7bn/- to a whopping 21bn/- in this financial year.
This decision is a superb one as it demonstrates government’s seriousness in uplifting farm productivity by enabling more peasants to get access to basic inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides.
Tariffs imposed on imported farm machinery have also been slashed down with a view to kick-starting some kind of farm mechanization.
However, we have to be cautious about these grand fiscal strategies if we are truly interested in seeing effective and concrete outcomes in the near future.
Some glaring missing links need to be simultaneously addressed in the course of financing subsidies.
Farmers need the technical support of extension workers and the application of research findings to their routine farm undertakings.
The few extension workers available should be granted attractive incentives that would, for instance, encourage them to stay in the rural areas and become part of the farming community.
We have seen cases where extension workers behave as sojourners: they would visit villages riding motorbikes, stay with farmers for a few hours in a week and then ricle back to their urban residences.
A scheme like provision of soft loan to extension workers for housing and establishment of their own pilot farms might probably make them feel better at staying in villages.
Pitifully, agricultural research is the least funded component in the responsible Ministry.
At the same time, there are no clear links between research business and agricultural development policies.
As it stands at the moment, agricultural research has to be publicly funded and its practical findings have to be disseminated free of charge to farmers.
The toddling private sector has not aggressively engaged itself into big business farming due to policy uncertainties.
Consequently, it has little or no reason to finance research and development (R&D) in agriculture under the current circumstances.
Reports abound that some of our agricultural colleges, including renowned Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) have conducted several studies with exciting results.
Yet, practical strategies for widespread dissemination of the same has been lacking for decades.
This is one of the critical areas where public funding support could bring out effective and sustainable impact.
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