In the Field
Dar es Salaam – January 26, 2011
Land O’Lakes International Development has just launched a new US $8 million, three-year USDA-funded dairy development program in Tanzania that is expected to directly improve incomes and strengthen food security for nearly 18,000 farmers and agricultural input and service providers. The program will also indirectly benefit an additional 87,000 family members, and raise awareness about the nutritional value of milk among consumers.
A number of Tanzanian and US government officials joined Land O’Lakes to speak at the program launch of the Tanzania Dairy Development Program (TDDP), including from the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development; Ministry of Industry and Trade; Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives; and the Tanzania Dairy Board.
Building on Land O’Lakes previous USAID-funded dairy development initiatives in Tanzania that date back to 1999, TDDP will improve milk production all along the value chain, focusing on the Northern Corridor areas of Tanga, Kilimanjaro, Arusha and Mara districts. Market development activities will focus on the entire country.
Minister of Parliament Benedict Ole Nangoro, the Deputy Minister for Livestock and Fisheries, spoke passionately about the need for programs such as TDDP to “serve as a model and generate lessons learned for improved food security that can be emulated elsewhere in the country.” He noted that about 10 percent of the milk produced annually enters the market, with the remainder consumed at home or wasted due to inadequate collection systems.
While Tanzania possesses Africa’s third-largest cattle herd, and nearly two-thirds of the rural poor already own livestock, most farmers are unable to enjoy the incomes and improved food security that the dairy industry provides in neighboring countries such as Kenya.
Director of National Food Security John Mngodo explained, “Despite the fact that small-scale dairying is an important agricultural activity for many poor families, dairy cooperatives are still very few.” Only 142 of the country’s 9,501 registered cooperatives focus on livestock or dairy. He added, “This attests to the significance of this program, which aims to create and strengthen dairy cooperatives at the grassroots.”
Land O’Lakes TDDP program will provide training and technical assistance to increase 17,000 farmers’ incomes by 25 percent, and develop market linkages to improve the dairy cold chain. It will also strengthen the supply of key inputs, boost the quality of Tanzanian dairy products to reduce import substitution, and improve awareness about milk’s nutritional benefits to raise domestic consumption among 1.5 million consumers.
Land O’Lakes Regional Director for Africa Dr. Joe Carvalho explained that the program was designed to support Government of Tanzania policies such as Vision 2025 and Kilimo Kwanza, which are aimed at improving people’s standards of living through improved agricultural production. “We will do this by increasing the availability of milk on the farm and for consumers – while also improving incomes and creating new jobs for dairy stakeholders working all along the value chain.” The end goal is to transform the dairy sector from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture, he added.
Rachel Trego from the U.S Department of Agriculture said the three-year effort, part of the Food for Progress Program, showed the commitment of the American people to help to ensure lasting food security for the people of Tanzania.
Quoting U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Trego said, “This food assistance program furthers the Obama Administration’s efforts to introduce and expand free enterprise in the agricultural sector of developing countries and emerging democracies around the world.” She added that within the last year, USDA has provided more than $145 million in international assistance under the Food for Progress Program, benefiting more than 3.4 million people and providing access to new opportunities for farmers and rural communities worldwide.
Land O’Lakes is the second largest food and agricultural cooperative in the United States doing business in all 50 states. Building in the company’s 90 years of agribusiness cooperative heritage, Land O’Lakes International Development has implemented 260 programs in over 75 countries since 1981.
The Guardian, a major daily paper in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, published an article about the program launch. To access the article, click here.
Since 2008, a cooperative of 154 oil palm farmers that comprise the Aguan Valley Palm Producers Association (APROVA) more than doubled their profits and their fruit collection capacity and opened their own refinement plant with assistance provided by TechnoServe under USDA’s Food for Progress (FFPr) Program.
Before this FFPr project began, the farmers lacked access to scales and a centralized collection center. Their disorganization put them in unfavorable negotiating positions and hurt their earning power. Recognizing that APROVA needed a clear business strategy to succeed, TechnoServe submitted an FFPr proposal that USDA accepted in fiscal year 2005. USDA donated 4,000 tons of soybean meal and 9,350 tons of wheat to TechnoServe to sell in Honduras. The funds generated from the sale were used by TechnoServe to help APROVA develop their organizational, financial, administrative and marketing capacity.
The development organization ACDI/VOCA has established 22 sites in Haiti where women and can receive ante- and post-natal care and have their children’s nutritional status screened. Currently, health facilities regularly monitor 365 babies in the Bodarie area, 365 families also receive related family rations.
For years, life in the Labongali internally displaced persons (IDP) camp consisted of long periods of tediousness punctuated by eruptions of sheer terror. A settlement of some 5,000 households displaced by a campaign of terror initiated by the Lord’s Resistance Army, the camp was one of over 100 IDP camps dotting northeastern and western Uganda, refuge for virtually the entire rural population.
When peace returned in 2007, the population was reluctant to resume farming. After 15 years of insecurity, many believed that the calm would not last. Encouraged by ACDI/VOCA field staff, however, a group of 30 members (initially 25 women and 5 men) organized themselves into a farmer group and adopted the name of Can Oroma, which means “poverty has overwhelmed us.” Initial trainings in agronomic practices, credit and savings, and Farming as a Business encouraged the group to adopt commercialized rice farming as a business enterprise in September 2007.
Since 1989, the development organization ACDI/VOCA, has been helping Ugandan smallholder farmers through the USAID-funded PL 480 Title II program. These programs have helped farmers increase and improve production so that they can not only achieve food security but also make money selling part of their crops to nearby markets. Currently, ACDI/VOCA is implementing a Title II program in Uganda that started in 2007 and will end in 2011.
Many of the beneficiaries of the program are women like Katie Saram (left), from Mbale. Like most rural Ugandan women, Saram used to work alone, cultivating a small plot of land using traditional techniques. In July 2007, Saram learned about a demonstration garden created by a Ugandan NGO called Farming for Food and Development-Eastern Uganda, known as FADEP.
Bolivia is the poorest, most food insecure country in South America. Eight in ten rural families live in poverty. The altiplano, the vast, high‐plains region stretching across the Western half of Bolivia, is home to many rural indigenous families where development is hindered by a number of factors, including inadequate access to capital, markets and commercialization services for agricultural products and businesses; poor technology transfer; disorganized, and ineffective agri‐business value chains.
Between 2003 and 2009, with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food for Progress program, Project Concern International conducted three phases of the “MIS Llamas Project” with 139 communities that depended almost exclusively on llama herds for their livelihoods.
Thanks to a World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) program in Kenya funded by USDA’s Food for Progress Program (FFP), nearly 3,000 subsistence-level farmers—many of them women—are increasing agricultural production, feeding their families, and having money left over to pay bills.
In 2006, USDA donated 26,610 metric tons of wheat valued at $6.1 million to WOCCU under a three-year FFP agreement. The wheat was sold in Kenya and the proceeds were used by WOCCU to work with local credit unions to provide small-scale farmers with access to:
- affordable agricultural financing with terms that meet their cash-flow needs;
- agricultural training in marketable and labor-saving crops appropriate for farmers weakened by HIV/AIDS; and
- direct market relationships to sell their crops to reputable buyers, as well as connections with other value chain stakeholders.
Through a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) McGovern‐Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition program, Project Concern International (PCI) has helped improve the nutritional status of over 162,000 children in rural communities in Bolivia. Nationwide, almost two‐thirds of the Bolivian population lives in poverty. Food insecurity and low educational attainment have a significant, negative impact on Bolivia’s economy.
In an effort to address food insecurity among schoolchildren PCI worked in collaboration with the Bolivian government, local schools and communities to provide meals in schools each day in the departments of La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro and Potosí. The program increased school attendance and enrollment rates, increased community support and education, improved the school feeding structure and sustainability of the program and developed national school feeding legislation.
After three years of successfully feeding children in 112 primary schools and 21 preschools and mothers and infants in 58 maternal and child health nutrition (MCHN) centers in the Matam region of Senegal, USDA recently renewed its agreement with Counterpart International (CPI) under its McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition (McGovern-Dole) Program for another three years.
Most people in the Matam region are extremely poor and face high rates of malnutrition. In addition, the area receives little rainfall and food prices are inflated, making food unaffordable for vulnerable households. As a result, roughly 30 percent of children under the age of five are stunted in height and 58 percent of women of child-bearing age suffer from anemia.
In 2006, Uganda’s Eastern Dairies, a company comprised of 11 local dairy cooperatives, quadrupled its sales in one year with assistance provided by Land O’Lakes, Inc., under USDA’s Food for Progress (FFPr) Program.
Before this FFPr project began, the cooperatives’ more than 500 members—of which 50 percent are women— were suffering from insufficient household incomes and lacked the ability to independently address Uganda’s low milk prices, volatile demand swings and unreliable payments by some buyers. In recognition of these problems, Land O’Lakes submitted an FFPr proposal to provide technical assistance and training to Uganda’s dairy industry to increase its productivity and competitiveness through market development, quality assurance and capacity building activities.