TANZANIA – Tanzania Dairy Board has signed a memorandum of understanding with Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank (TADB) on development of the dairy value chain.

A report by TheCitizen indicates that the agreement targets to enhance sector growth and help strengthen the capabilities in Tanzania’s dairy.

“This agreement meant a lot for increasing productivity, sustainable production in dairy sector, capacity building for stakeholders including training and technology,” said TADB managing director, Mr Augustino Chacha.

According to him, support for the sector would enable it contribute significantly to government revenues as well as national economic growth.

The agreement would help the availability of capital highly needed to stimulate growth and development of dairy sector among stakeholders.

“The availability of modern equipment needed at all stages of production will play a significant role in the sector.

We are optimistic that the agreement with TADB was meaningful,” said the acting Registrar of TDB, Dr Sophia Mlote.

She said in ensuring the efforts to build the mid-sized and industrial base economy by 2025, the government was waiving taxes in sector to encourage and attract more investments.

Dairy sector development

In a period of 15 years to 2017, Tanzania milk production increased by 400 million litres to 2.4 billion litres per year, according to sectorial statistics.

The country unveiled the Dairy Development Forum (DDF) where value chain actors including producers, traders, input suppliers, extension workers, service providers and processors meet annually to network, exchange information, discuss problems facing the sector, and come up with solutions to those problems.

Milk consumption in Tanzania remains low at only 47 litres per capita per year despite the country having estimated 30.5 million heads of cattle.

Tanzania targets to achieve a 200 litre per capita consumption of milk as recommended by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) but this is in contrast with the current yields which have proved insufficient to achieve this value.

In the region, Tanzania and Kenya are among the major producers of milk.

The dairy sector has been suffering from increasing imports from the European Union leading milk producers, that is Germany, France, Poland, Netherlands, Italy and the UK.