Browsing: Food Security

Coronavirus has brought enormous setbacks, suffering, and forecasts of a global depression ahead following the closure of so many economies for so long.  However, if there has been one area where it has exposed our global fragility, that area has been food. 

Certainly, the curfews, lockdowns and workplace closures delivered an uptick in power cuts, but there is no great clamour about our energy infrastructure now being under threat of failure. Likewise, with water, it remains far from accessible to all, but it has not been plundered by this year’s pandemic. Shelter could take a hit on joblessness and unpaid rents. But the elephant in the room is definitely food. 

That fact has not gone unremarked. At the level of international geopolitics, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned us all that we are moving into a famine of what it has called ‘biblical’ proportions, by which, it is

The Tanzania Horticultural Association (Taha) is reporting an increase in revenue from the export of avocados which until now were not considered key export cash crop. 

However growing demand in the US and Europe has seen the sub-sector increase revenue to US$23 million annually. 

Tanzania is the second largest producer of avocado fruit in Africa second only to Kenya. Over the past five years, avocado exports have leap-frogged from 1,877 tonnes in 2014 to 9,000 tonnes in 2019 and were it not for the COVID-19 outbreak, this figure was expected to go higher. 

Also Read: COVID-19 response must target African agriculture and the rural poor

Kenya is already doing much better with its estimated annual output of about 190,000 tonnes as the country exports an average of 10,000 metric tonnes annually. 

In Tanzania, there are about 10,000 farmers of the crop who