Browsing: Africa

The Impact of COVID-19 on agriculture value chains especially transportation logistics is immense. Economies must adopt, industries and sectors must find their own solutions to the bottlenecks in the agri-food supply chain.

Now that it is no longer business as usual, what makes up for robust food supply chains when borders are shut down? Will air travel cut prizes and yet break even in cross border food supply routes? What technological advances must we embrace in food production to bridge the growing supply gap? How can digital systems help speed up logistics integration in the transportation sector?

These are the questions that must be answered to charter the way forward for Africa’s food security and maybe even the World’s.

https://theexchange.africa/industry-and-trade/agribusiness/how-africas-122-million-mobile-banking-accounts-can-fund-agriculture/

While the COVID-19 crisis has brought to our door steps the largest challenge for food security of modern times; with lock downs, quarantines and logistics disruptions not to mention the …

No continent suffers worse food security issues than Africa, yet despite the high productivity coupled with disease and drought resistant capabilities of genetic modified organisms (GMOs), Africa has long been resistant to genetically modified food, be they crop or animal embryos.

While the average beef cattle in Africa, say the local Zebu weighs an average weight of a mere 250kg market weight, hybrid beef cattle like the Aryshire, weighs an average of 400kg, almost double the local African breed.

Instead of settling for 1 to 3 litres of milk per day from your local Zebu, you could get in excess of 10 litres of milk everyday from a hybrid Fresian, almost four times more milk.

Not only does the Aryshire beef bull and the Fresian cow produce more, they grow faster and when crossbred, they are even resistant to disease and bad weather. So why would food troubled Africa resist …

While all other agricultural exports are suffering reduced demand owing to the Covid-19 global pandemic, that is not the case for tobacco which has recorded remarkable increase in sales at the beginning of the marketing season.

Reports from Zimbabwe say export of flue-cured tobacco is stable and prices are firm, with tobacco sales having increased more than quadrupled over the cause of the last and the present season. Last season closed with sales of USD232 008 but this season has opened with sales of USD1 598 230 that is a 588 percent increase!

As market season opened at the start of the month, an impressive USD1.6 million was sold. With attractive prices that begun above USD 5 per kilogramme, farmers were more than willing to sell. Only three days after the marketing season opened, farmers had sold almost 700 000 kilogrammes of tobacco.

The country’s Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board …

Total Uganda has bought out the financial struggling Tullow Oil for a whopping USD575 million as the latter gears up to leave the East African market.

The buyout will be paid in part by a USD 500 million initial payment payable upon completion and another USD75 million payable when the project pact is finalized.

With completion of the sell, Total Uganda will now own Tullow’s assets on the humongous Lake Albert Development project and the even larger East African Crude Oil Pipeline project. Tullow, a British owned conglomerate has been struggling and the just inked Uganda buy out will help improve its liquidity.

The move is not due to the ongoing global coronivrus pandemic, it is rather a strategic plan that was on the table long before the pandemic begun. At the start of the year, the sale and purchase agreement had already been signed, well before the Covi-19 virus …

The African Development Bank Group has got a new member, Ireland, bringing its total number of international members to 27. Ireland’s membership goes along way to boosting the banks financial muscle and with it, the ability to fund development projects across the continent.

Ireland officially joined the Group last month after a declaration of its membership was issued in late April, a little less than an year after the country submitted its application to join the Group mid last year.

Following the declaration, Ireland’s top ranking government official the Minister for Finance Mr. Paschal Donohoe explained that its membership will serve to create investment opportunities for Irish businesses.

Short of detailing what business sectors will be targeted, the minister said the membership will help to advance shared development priorities, a view shared by the Bank’s President, Mr. Akinwumi Adesina,

The Bank’s president maintained that joining of its newest international member …

The globe is at a stand-still position and Africa is hurting and expected to also sustain serious repercussions from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which has already claimed nearly 2,000 lives, infected over 60,000 people and around 21,000 managed to recover According to the latest data by the John Hopkins University and Africa Center for Disease Control on COVID-19 in Africa.

The pandemic has brought rather crucial ideas from South Africa’s President and African Union chairperson Cyril Ramaphosa on Africa requesting a two-year debt standstill to provide governments with the fiscal space to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

As the world strives to attain a balance between staying safe and breathing life back to the economy, Africa is taking the entire perspective of the pandemic on its axis, while other nations move around several measures, some African nations have managed to somewhat contain the virus to a certain extent.

The

Members of Parliament in Tanzania are urging the government to consider giving tax breaks to businesses in a bid to help them stay afloat.

Alternatively, the government is encouraged, through the Central Bank, to scrap interest on loans so that borrowers do not fall into default.

At the moment, despite the global slowdown, businesses are still operational but they are operating way below their year revenue projections. Already, at the start of the second quarter, the country is facing potentially huge loan defaults by both large corporations as well as small and medium sized companies.

Big businesses are now turning to the government to intervene. While the Central Bank, the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) has already issued a stimulus package for commercial banks, the Tanzania Private Sector Foundation (TPSF) is working on an arrangement to save large borrowers from mega defaults that would in effect ripple throughout the economy.

Commercial …

Once upon a time in Kenya, tea and coffee were the big players, the rulers of the country’s agribusiness the top foreign exchange earners.

However with time passing the crops contribution to annual earnings kept falling, because the farmers were simply not getting paid in time. The peasants’ payment was little and delayed.

As a result, production and quality of the coffee and tea out remained poor and could not earn the country its potential income from the sector.

Now the government has set aside USD15 million to revitalize the sector. The funding is from the World Bank which is meant to compliment another USD30 million that Kenya set aside back in January.

What is to be learnt here is not just the will to revitalize the coffee and tea sectors but also the willingness to admit what the problem was in the first place, slow and low payment of …

The falling price of crude oil spells good favour for importers in Africa. The price of crude has been on a steady drop despite attempts by producers to cut output. As a result, many African countries are taking advantage of the situation and stock piling their reserves.

Take for instance the case of East Africa, crude oil represents more than 20 percent of Tanzania’s annual imports. So a drop in price of crude means the country can afford to buy more and reserve for future use. However no official report has been issued as to the government policy on the matter.

The issue that arises here is the matter of crude versus refined oil. Africa, Tanzania included, imports refined oil which is more costly than crude but with falling prices of crude then follows that  even the price of refined oil has taken a dive

As such, the country is …

Countries neighbouring Tanzania including Uganda, Rwanda and Zambia have barred truck drivers from the country to cross their borders. The development comes as cases of the COVID-19 in Tanzania now reach 480 with 196 new cases reported both on the mainland and on the island of Zanzibar.

Of these, 174 are from Tanzania Mainland and the other 22 are from spice isles of Zanzibar. The grim news gets only worse with the announcement of six more deaths bringing the total number of deaths to 16.

Not all is doom and gloom, there are reports of 167 people recovering from the virus and of these, 36 are from Zanzibar and 83 are from the Mainland.

Meanwhile, truck drivers are protesting the strict border measures placed on transit vehicles. For example, at the Mutukula border with Uganda, it is reported that several drivers have tested positive for the coronavirus and been denied …