Activities in Tanzania

Project for Supporting Rice Industry Development in Tanzania (Tanrice 2)

Type	Project	Area	Period	Tanzania Organization	Cost (Mill. Yen)
Tech	Project for Supporting Rice Industry Development in Tanzania (Tanrice 2)	Whole country	Nov. 2012 – Dec. 2018	Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives	950

Rice is one of the most important staple foods in Tanzania. As the consumption of rice has been increasing rapidly year by year, domestic production fails to keep up with this demand. As a result, Tanzania is forced to import rice to maintain an adequate supply. Therefore, it can be said that increasing rice production is an important agenda for national food security.

Rice in Tanzania is also important in realizing commercialization of agriculture for the following two reasons; (1) it has a high potential of increasing its production from technical point of view, (2) it is one of the major cash crops in the country.

This is the background against which the Government of Tanzania formulated a National Rice Development Strategy (NRDS) in 2009, targeting to double its rice production of up to 1.96 million tons by 2018 (compared to the production in 2008) through intensification of irrigated paddy production.

Japan has been continuously working to develop irrigated paddy cultivation since the 1970s, initially in the Moshi Rural District in the Kilimanjaro Region. The resulting rice yield has already reached 6 tons per hectare, easily outstripping the national average (about 2 tons per hectare). In order to further spread this success, Kilimanjaro Agricultural Training Center (KATC) has played a key role since 1990s and efforts have been made to increase rice production by establishing and implementing various agricultural training programmes for agricultural extension officers, irrigation technicians and farmers.

During the 5 years of cooperation by "Technical Cooperation in Supporting Service Delivery Systems of Irrigated Agriculture (Tanrice)", the above mentioned training programmes are adopted at 5 agricultural training institutes including KATC to help farmers increase their rice production. The farmers who participated in the training successfully shared their knowledge with other farmers. The training covers a package of inexpensive but important basic farming techniques, such as ridge management, field leveling, straight-row planting, and the use of handmade weeding machines.

Based on the achievement of Tanrice, JICA initiated the "Project for Supporting Rice Industry Development in Tanzania (Tanrice 2)" in November 2012. This project aims at further dissemination of rice farming technologies nationwide in partnership with 7 agricultural training institutes (2 more institute are added since Tanrice). As the rainfed cultivation needs to be improved from the perspective of poverty reduction, training approach for disseminating the appropriate rainfed rice cultivation technologies will be explored. Furthermore this project also tackles with the task to promote value chain of rice industry by developing appropriate subject-matter training courses. Through these activities, rice production is expected to increase across the country.