AGCOT Centre evidence review finds record production of 10.9 million tonnes but thin, highly yield-sensitive margins per hectare, and sets out six Entry Point Projects for Government, the private sector and development partners to take forward

DAR ES SALAAM, 29 September 2026 – Tanzania now grows far more maize than it eats. The question facing the country is no longer whether its farmers can feed the nation, but whether the farmers who produced that surplus are any better off for it.

That is the central argument of Turning Maize Surplus into Farmer Income: A Per-Hectare Diagnosis, Regional Benchmark and Transformation Delivery Framework, an evidence review released on 29 September 2026 by the Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania (AGCOT) Centre. The report, built almost entirely on the Government of Tanzania’s own 2026/27 budget documents and the Economic Survey 2025, calls on the Ministry of Agriculture, public agencies, banks, millers, traders, cooperatives and development partners to take its findings into a structured delivery lab later this year.

A surplus of historic proportions

Official figures show maize output rising from 7.0 million tonnes in 2021 to 10.9 million tonnes in the 2024/25 crop season, an increase of 55 per cent in four years. Against a 2025/26 national requirement of 7.4 million tonnes, that leaves a surplus of 3.5 million tonnes and a self-sufficiency ratio of 148 per cent. In plain terms, Tanzania grows roughly half as much maize again as it needs.

Maize now accounts for 73 per cent of all cereals and 46 per cent of all food crops produced in the country. The 3.5-million-tonne surplus alone is about one third of the national crop. The report observes that it is larger than Kenya’s entire annual import requirement and roughly equal to Zambia’s total production in its 2024/25 recovery year, concluding that Tanzania’s maize economy has become structurally export-oriented whether or not policy says so.

The Minister of Agriculture has described the national goal as making Tanzania “ghala la chakula barani Afrika” – the food store of Africa. On the production side, the report finds, that ambition is within reach.

What drove the growth

The surge was input-led. Fertiliser consumption doubled from 477,000 tonnes in 2020/21 to 972,000 tonnes in 2024/25, and nutrient use per hectare rose from 19 kg to 27 kg across all crops. A maize seed subsidy, introduced in 2024/25, moved 55,041 tonnes of improved seed to 531,903 farmers in 2025/26, up from 9,640 tonnes the previous year — enough, at a standard seeding rate, to plant roughly half the national maize area.

Under both subsidy programmes the Government pays about 23 per cent of the input price and farmers pay about 77 per cent. The report calculates that subsidised seed for one hectare costs a farmer TZS 131,400 (US$52), and 200 kg of subsidised fertiliser costs TZS 275,400 (US$108). Together, the fertiliser subsidy (TZS 281.6 billion of Government money to March 2026) and the maize seed subsidy (TZS 84.85 billion) now exceed the Ministry of Agriculture’s entire 2021/22 budget of TZS 294 billion.

Where farmer income stands

Farm-level returns have not kept pace with national output. Using official input prices, a stated assumption for land preparation, labour, harvesting and transport of TZS 400,000–700,000 per hectare, and a farm-gate price of TZS 600 per kilogram, the report models a central-case net margin of US$37–154 per hectare (TZS 93,000–393,000) at a yield of 2.0 tonnes per hectare.

The report is explicit that this is a modelled estimate built on stated assumptions, not a measured national farmer-income statistic. Its sensitivity analysis, however, is stark:

• Yield dominates. Each additional half-tonne per hectare adds about TZS 300,000 (US$118) to the margin. Moving from 2.0 to 2.5 tonnes per hectare roughly doubles a farmer’s take-home.
• Price matters, but less. At 2.0 tonnes, a TZS 150/kg rise in price has the same effect as half a tonne of extra yield.
• At low yields and harvest-time prices, farmers lose money. At 1.5 tonnes per hectare and TZS 500/kg, the margin is negative across the entire cost range — the position of a low-input farmer forced to sell in June or July.
• Fertiliser shocks pass straight through. A 25 per cent rise in the subsidised bag price would cut the central margin by between 18 and 74 per cent.

The break-even yield in the central case is 1.34–1.84 tonnes per hectare. For many smallholders, the report notes, the difference between profit and loss is measured in a few hundred kilograms.

The harvest-time trap

Prices have swung sharply as production has risen. The national wholesale price climbed to TZS 1,052/kg in 2023 after a poor 2022 harvest, fell 35 per cent to TZS 688/kg when the 2024 crop passed 10 million tonnes, and recovered to TZS 750/kg (US$294 per tonne) in 2025 — still 29 per cent below 2023. The Ministry attributes even the 2025 recovery to demand from neighbouring countries. Meanwhile, food inflation rose to 6.4 per cent in 2025 from 2.1 per cent, driven by millet, maize and rice.

Within each year, prices are lowest during the Southern Highlands harvest, from roughly May to August, and highest between December and March. A farmer who can store for four to six months can capture more of that gap; a farmer who must sell at harvest cannot.

The tools to close that gap largely exist, but have not yet been applied to maize. The National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA) has tripled its storage capacity from 251,000 tonnes in 2020/21 to 776,000 tonnes, with a target of 3 million tonnes by 2030. Yet in the first nine months of 2025/26 it bought 135,290 tonnes — 11.9 per cent of its 1.14-million-tonne purchase plan — and it publishes no buying price. The warehouse receipt system and the Tanzania Mercantile Exchange (TMX), which have carried TZS 3.74 trillion of cooperative sales of crops such as cashew, sesame and pulses, do not yet handle maize. The Ministry has committed to add maize to the system in 2026/27.

Kenya and Zambia: a regional benchmark

The report benchmarks Tanzania against its two closest comparators. Kenya, which is usually short of maize and imports chiefly from Tanzania and Uganda, recorded an average farmer price of KSh 7,005.1 per 100 kg in 2025 — about US$541 per tonne, against Tanzania’s US$294 wholesale and roughly US$235 at the farm gate. Zambia publishes an official Food Reserve Agency floor price, set at K340 per 50 kg bag for the 2025 marketing season (about US$269 per tonne) and paid at more than 1,400 open satellite depots.

The comparison, the report argues, carries four lessons: price certainty is a policy choice; higher prices do not automatically mean higher margins where land and labour cost more; Kenya’s deficit is Tanzania’s market if the trade is formalised; and a floor price alone cannot fix yield risk. Per-hectare margins across the three countries cannot yet be compared directly, because current cost-of-production data for Kenya and Zambia have not been obtained.

The diagnosis

The review distils its findings into one sentence: Tanzania’s maize farmers commonly sell an unstored surplus at harvest into a regional market shaped by demand in Kenya and Uganda, without a published domestic price reference, a maize warehouse-receipt route, or a reconciled official yield statistic.

That last gap is described as the single most important weakness in the evidence. None of the official documents reviewed states the area planted to maize or the national yield per hectare, which means the lever that most determines farmer income is not currently measured.

Six Entry Point Projects

Rather than proposing new spending, the report builds six Entry Point Projects (EPPs) on commitments the Government has already made and funded:

1. Publish the Numbers — a reconciled area, yield and production table and a monthly farm-gate price index, led by the Ministry of Agriculture with the National Bureau of Statistics and the Bank of Tanzania.
2. Maize into the Warehouse Receipt System and TMX — starting with an initial 30 licensed warehouses in Mbeya, Songwe, Njombe, Iringa, Ruvuma and Rukwa, with at least two banks lending against maize receipts, and a proposed 500,000 tonnes a year through the system by 2030.
3. NFRA Pre-Season Indicative Price and Purchase Calendar — a buying price, volume, depots and months published before planting each March, with quarterly reporting against the plan.
4. Yield Step-Up — a site-specific agronomic recommendation attached to every subsidised seed and fertiliser transaction, drawing on the Ministry’s soil-health mapping of 40 million hectares, with a proposed gain of 0.5 tonnes per hectare by 2030.
5. Fertiliser Cost Resilience — commissioning the Dar es Salaam blending plant, bringing agricultural lime onto the subsidy list and diversifying import origins, to lift the domestic share of supply from 12 to 40 per cent.
6. Formalised Cross-Border Maize Trade — operating the five strategic border markets at Busoka (Kahama), Kabanga (Ngara), Nkwenda and Murongo (Kyerwa) and Sirari (Tarime), now 81 per cent complete, admitting regional buyers to TMX and publishing a written, stock-triggered export rule.

Two cross-cutting enablers underpin all six: a national cost-of-production survey for maize, and implementation of the Prime Minister’s 2026 directive against arbitrary produce levies and lumbesa over-packing, a practice the report estimates transfers 10–20 per cent of a sack’s value from farmer to trader.

All targets are presented as proposals for stakeholder testing. Among them: the modelled central-case farmer margin rising to US$150–250 per hectare by 2028 and US$250–350 by 2030, and NFRA purchases reaching at least 80 per cent of announced targets by 2030.

Risks the report does not hide

The review is candid about what could go wrong. Fertiliser import prices rose between 4 and 46 per cent from March to May 2026, with more than 80 per cent of supply imported and 70 per cent sourced from the Middle East. Banks may decline maize receipts over quality and aflatoxin risk. A good Kenyan harvest could depress regional demand. An ad hoc export restriction could undermine formal contracts. And the proposed data reconciliation could reveal a lower production or yield figure than is currently reported, in which case the report states that targets should be reset on the reconciled baseline.

AGCOT as convenor, not owner

AGCOT Centre, designated Flagship No. 7 of the Agriculture Master Plan 2050, proposes itself as a coordination and delivery-support unit working with the Agriculture Transformation Office — maintaining a shared KPI dashboard, running weekly problem-solving and convening private partners. Legal and operational ownership of each EPP would remain with the institution holding the relevant mandate: the Ministry of Agriculture, NFRA, the Warehouse Receipts Regulatory Board, TMX, the Tanzania Fertilizer Company, the Tanzania Fertilizer Regulatory Authority, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Maize is the one commodity grown at scale in all four AGCOT corridors – Southern (SAGCOT), Central, Northern and Mtwara – with the Southern Highlands as its heartland. A maize commodity compact, the report suggests, could become the first national-scale application of the AGCOT model.

What happens next

The report is framed as the pre-lab evidence pack. It proposes a six-week delivery lab with full-time secondees from each owner institution and private participants, producing a charter, costed implementation plan and KPI sheet for every EPP. Structured consultations with Permanent Secretaries and parliamentary stakeholders would follow, culminating in a public stakeholder validation session at which farmer organisations, cooperatives, traders, millers, banks and the press can challenge the targets before they are finalised.

A Southern Highlands maize commodity compact would be signed at that session, binding public owners to the six EPPs and private participants — seed and fertiliser companies, warehouse owners, banks, millers and regional buyers — to specified investment and off-take, with Lake and Central zones to follow as the warehouse receipt programme scales.

Quoting Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the Prime Minister reminded Parliament this year that true development begins when citizens can produce enough food for themselves. Tanzania has met that first condition. The report’s argument is that the next test is whether the farmer who produced the surplus can plan, store and sell it at a price that rewards the effort.

About the report. Turning Maize Surplus into Farmer Income (AGCOT Centre, September 2026) is an evidence review. It does not constitute Government policy or a commitment by any institution named. Every figure is tagged by evidentiary weight: [A] drawn from official documents; [B] from official sources awaiting confirmation; [C] stated working assumptions; and [P] proposals for stakeholder consultation. The report is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence.