Tomorrow (Sunday), I will embark upon the open road to visit the regions of Morogoro and Iringa (see map!). The goal of this trip is to meet with regional and district government officials to collect data about fruit and vegetables production - number of farmers, land yields, variety, etc. I will also meet with the very few fruit and vegetable processors in these regions to learn more about their business operations and how intervention (ie, through the USAID grant via TechnoServe) at the farmer level might ease processor pains. I want to understand more about the transport of fruits & vegetables where farmers might re-capture value by collaborating on shipping so that the processor does not have to send individual, huge trucks to each farm. I am looking forward to meeting with farmers on their land to find out more about the current conditions in which they conduct business. I will be traveling with Deo, a TechnoServe driver and former national team soccer player, who will also help translate Swahili for me.
The challenge faced by most farmers in Tanzania is that they don’t realize they are a business. Low, fair, and high prices are understood. Product quality is understood. Even farmer collectives are understood in order to garner a higher price by volume. The obvious makes sense – in most cases.
However, many farmers do not recognize the utility of their role as an agri-business. They miss how an investment in a certain type of fertilizer can strengthen a crop – or how other production techniques(ie, meeting organic-certified conditions) can merit a higher price from buyers as long as the actual conditions are followed. One tomato processor that I spoke with at the end of last week mentioned that his company had established an incentive program for farmers producing high quality volume. Whoever produced the highest volume and met the incentive goals got a goat – or some other type of valued investment. However, the company could not sustain the incentive program, so after a while they stopped the rewards. Instead of adopting and integrating the incentive-driven behavior into their farming practices, the volume lagged and quality faltered. The farmers did not improve their chances to position themselves as a higher quality production. In short, the incentive program only achieved short-term gains.
That said, there is much to learn and I am setting out to gather data and meet with people to represent TechnoServe in the horticulture space. The data is needed not only to formulate TechnoServe’s overall strategy for participating in the fruits and vegetables industry – it is needed to demonstrate and calculate how the USAID funding we are applying for can be invested in order to improve the value chain and increase incomes for small-holder farmers.
I will depart tomorrow afternoon with Deo spending three nights across several districts of Morogoro before we drive further south-west to Iringa. Morogoro is not much of a town – but it is located at the crossroad of the Tanzanian railroad and a “major” highway. Iringa, on the other hand, is at 1,600m elevation – might be chilly at night – and is apparently small and gorgeous. It’s some of the best soil in Tanzania and produces incredible crops.
I will be traveling from this Sunday through next Saturday. It's about a nine hour drive from the last area south of Iringa we will travel to before returning to Dar. Internet access will be a true luxury – if at all available (which I am not expecting due to the slow, slow speeds of Dar) – so I will be back and send along a blog update then!
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