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Kilimanjaro makes ’coffee headway’
2006-07-23 10:31:57
By Salome Kitomary, PST ,Moshi
Kilimanjaro Region has managed to uproot aged and unproductive coffee trees and replaced them with a total of 24 million new, improved and disease resistant varieties during a ten-year campaign to revive the region’s sole export cash crop that started during the 1997/98 crop season.
In an exclusive interview, the Kilimanjaro Regional Commissioner, Mohammed Babu, told PST here yesterday that the re-planting exercise was equivalent to achieving about 38 per cent of the target.
In collaboration with the Lyamungo Tanzania Coffee Research Institute (TaCRI) in Hai District, the regional authority has managed to raise ten new improved varieties of disease resistant coffee seedlings.
Coffee stakeholder groups from all districts in the region working with TaCRI that offered technical know-how have managed to establish 39 improved variety coffee seedling nurseries with a total of 35,000 base improved coffee trees that are capable of producing 40 plantable materials (tissues) each per annum.
Babu said taking into consideration the fact that coffee is the economic mainstay of the region, coffee stakeholders were eager to transform the traditional coffee plantations into modern farming of quality crop but were overwhelmed by shortage of coffee seedlings.
And the shortage is a big blow to the campaign under which annual demand of the planting materials is targeted at seven million seedlings annually.
The RC further said that during the campaign, production rose from 4,600 tons in 1997/98 to 12,674 tons in 2001/2002, but production slumped to 4,600 tons again due to drought in 2003/2004.
Babu further said that during 2004/2005, coffee crop season production stabilized to a total of 5,400 tons and during the current 2005/2006 season a slight increase of production is estimated to clock 5,500 tons.
However, he added that producers were not worried about world market prices as it had stabilized from 2004/2005 season where an average price per kilo of coffee was between 1,200/- and 1,500/-, while the grade quality coffee fetched an average of more than 3,000/- per kilo.
He said the coffee prices were realized from auctions that were being facilitated by coffee smallholders primary cooperative societies affiliated to the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union Ltd., (KNCU) and the VUASU Cooperative Union (VUASU), together with individual groups, individual farmers, and sometimes direct sales to foreign buyers.
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