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| Drying sisal fibers in Tanga |
Katani Limited, a private company, has embarked on an ambitious project
to introduce sisal in Shinyanga Region as a second cash crop after cotton.
The company’s Director for Development, Mr Juma Salum Shamte said over
the weekend that the project has capitalized on the frequent drought in the
area. He said the company is working jointly with Oxfam and the government to
execute the 300,000-dollar-project (about 480m/-).
"The project has taken off on a sound note as production now
stands at 20 tonnes per month", he said. "Sisal is growing very well
in Shinyanga. The problem is that over the years the residents were using it as
a fence to demarcate their land," Mr Shamte said.
But this time around, he said, unstable
cotton prices in the world market has made life harder for farmers in
Shinyanga, thus a need to find an alternative crop. Mr Shamte said cotton is
the best alternative cash crop for Shinyanga because it needs little rainfall.
Currently, a tonne of sisal twine fetches up to 1,200 dollars (about
1.9m/-) in the world markets. "We are targeting to produce 10,000 tonnes
per year in the next four to five years," he said, adding that about
16,500 small scale farmers are going to benefit from the project.
"The project also brings awareness and economic opportunities in
the sisal value addition chain to Shinyanga from what we have experienced in
Tanga," he said.
On his part, Acting Executive Director of the Tanzania Investment
Centre (TIC), Mr Raymond Mbilinyi said that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)
are estimated to employ between four and five million of the country's total
labour force of 20 million.
A reasearch by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) shows that
was a positive correlation between a country's overall level of income and the
number of SMEs per 1,000 people. In the 1960s, Tanzania was the largest world
exporter of sisal, producing 230,000 tonnes per year.
But the production plummeted between the 1980s and 1990s due to sisal fibre
competing with synthetic and a drop of world prices. However, with
technological advances and a big demand of sisal, production has gone up
tremendously to about 30,000 tonnes per year between 2000 and 2008.
According to available data, the country has the potential to produce
about 500,000 tonnes annually. This can be achieved in the immediate term by
increasing yields and reviving existing estates to their full productive
capacity.
Meanwhile, Mr Shamte said his company has teamed up with the National
Social Security Fund (NSSF) to generate electricity using sisal waste and current.The project is
currently generating 4MW. "This will rise to 100MW once the project is
completed, in the next two years' time," he said.
The project is estimated to cost
100 million US dollars (about 160bn/-) to make the country the first in
Africa to produce power from sisal waste.
Katani is an agro-industrial entity
with activities ranging from growing sisal, technical services to more than
2,000 contract farmers, processing sisal leaves into fibre and value addition
and marketing, renewable energy production, consultancy and research and
development.
In its year of existence, Katani has played a key role in transforming
the lives of people in the surrounding communities, especially women who are
now earning up to 300 US dollars (480,000/-) a month from a meagre 30 US
dollars (48,000/-) ten years ago.
Source: The Daily News,http://www.dailynews.co.tz, reported by Abduel Elinaza
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