Morogoro, On the opening day of Nane Nane 88’s training programme at the AGCOT-coordinated pavilion in Morogoro, the Cereals and Other Produce Regulatory Authority (COPRA) — established under the Ministry of Agriculture pursuant to Tanzania’s food safety law — walked farmers, cooperative leaders and district agricultural officers through four formal market systems now being rolled out to replace the informal, often exploitative arrangements that have long characterised produce trading in much of the country. The session, delivered the same day Prime Minister Dr Mwigulu Nchemba toured the wider Nane Nane 88 Eastern Zone grounds, was organised by the Nane Nane Eastern Zone Preparatory Committee with AGCOT Centre Limited and livestreamed for farmers unable to attend in person.

COPRA’s trainer opened by explaining that four systems are now active nationally, with further systems still being finalised: a digital auction system built on the warehouse receipt model; an “aggregator model” for smallholders with small individual volumes; the Kasumulu Mode, a cross-border trade facilitation system; and a newly formalised regulatory framework for contract farming. All four share a common underlying goal, the trainer said: creating transparency and fairness between farmers and the buyers, processors, transporters and financiers who depend on what they produce.

System one: the digital auction, built on registered warehouses

The digital auction system connects a wide set of institutional stakeholders — COPRA itself, the Tanzania Mercantile Exchange (TMX), the Cereal Board (WRB), the Tanzania Cooperative Development Commission (TCDC), local government authorities, farmers, AMCOS (agricultural marketing cooperative societies), registered warehouse operators, buyers, processors and financial institutions, reflecting COPRA’s recognition that produce trade is inseparable from access to finance.

The mechanism works as follows: farmers or farmer groups first register and gain legal recognition, then receive appropriate agricultural extension support to produce quality crops. Once harvested, produce is delivered to a registered warehouse. When accumulated stock reaches 30 tonnes or more, the system permits an auction to be announced. TMX then issues the auction notice to registered, vetted buyers, who gain system access to review the produce’s declared specifications and bid competitively online; the highest qualifying bidder is declared the winner and issued formal purchase documentation.

System two: the aggregator model, for farmers with small volumes

Recognising that many smallholders harvest in quantities too small — a debe, half a debe, two debes — to reach a warehouse’s minimum threshold individually, COPRA’s aggregator model introduces a registered collection point operator (the “aggregator”) stationed near a registered warehouse. This person’s role is to gather produce from multiple smallholders, verify its quality, and consolidate it into a single lot large enough to list on the digital system, at which point registered buyers can purchase it directly.

The aggregator’s formal responsibilities include verifying that produce meets quality standards, serving as the connecting link between farmers and buyers, maintaining accurate production records, coordinating transport and storage, and working with COPRA to ensure trading procedures are followed. The trainer identified the model’s core benefits as guaranteeing farmers a reliable outlet without needing to independently locate or negotiate with a buyer, reducing individual collection costs, improving quality control and traceability, strengthening smallholders’ collective bargaining position, and — notably — displacing informal, unregulated trading practices colloquially referred to in some areas as “kangomba,” since all transactions under the system use standardised digital scales rather than informal measures open to manipulation.

System three: Kasumulu Mode, formalising cross-border trade

The Kasumulu Mode takes its name from the Kasumulu border post on Tanzania’s frontier with Malawi, where the system originated in response to a specific, recurring problem: traders who had secured buyers in Malawi for their produce frequently found the actual process of moving goods across the border slow, opaque and difficult to navigate under the standards and procedures the destination market required. The system was built to formalise and speed up that crossing process, and to make its requirements transparent and consistently applied.

Kasumulu Mode’s stakeholders extend beyond COPRA to include the Tanzania Plant Health and Pesticides Authority (TPHPA) — since produce crossing into another country requires phytosanitary clearance confirming it is disease- and pest-free — the Cereal Board (WRB), the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA), the Ministry of Industry and Trade, local government authorities and private-sector institutions, all of whom the trainer said are now co-located to deliver border clearance services in one place rather than requiring traders to navigate multiple separate offices and processes, a change intended specifically to reduce the delays and informal obstacles familiar to anyone who has tried to move goods across a Tanzanian land border.

The process runs as follows: a farmer’s harvest is collected through an AMCOS or farmer group and delivered to a registered warehouse; COPRA inspects and confirms quality and weight; TPHPA separately inspects and confirms the produce’s phytosanitary status for export; the resulting information is entered into the digital system and formal documentation issued; a registered buyer on the Malawi side views the listing and pays according to the set procedure; border agencies verify the documentation; and the produce crosses via the Kasumulu procedure to reach the buyer or processor in Malawi. The trainer confirmed the system currently operates at Kasumulu and is being extended to the Tunduma border post, with further border crossings to follow, potentially under new names depending on local circumstances.

Benefits cited included greater transparency, reduced time and cost in moving goods across the border, increased price competition and market access for farmers, reduced informal trading and produce smuggling, and — echoing the domestic systems — formalised tracking that allows government to know with confidence how much produce is leaving Tanzania through official channels.

System four: formalising contract farming

The session’s most detailed segment addressed contract farming — an arrangement long practised informally in Tanzania, where an investor or buyer identifies a farmer’s land, proposes a crop (the trainer used ginger as an illustrative example), and agrees informally to purchase the harvest at a set price in exchange for inputs or support during the season. The trainer was candid about why this needed formal regulation: such informal arrangements had no protection when things went wrong. He described visiting an area where an outside party had mobilised farmers to plant a particular crop, farmers had invested fully in growing it, and the party who had promised to buy the harvest subsequently disappeared — leaving farmers with sunk costs and no buyer. Because these arrangements previously operated without any government oversight, he said, there was no mechanism to hold either side accountable when a deal collapsed.

Under the newly formalised system, the process runs: an initial agreement between a farmer and an investor, buyer, processor or financial institution (which may itself be the party financing a farmer’s access to inputs, with repayment secured against the eventual harvest) is put into writing as a formal contract. This document is submitted to COPRA through the authority’s COPAMIS digital system, where COPRA’s legal team reviews it clause by clause, identifies gaps or concerns, and returns it to both parties with an explanation of the benefits and risks of each provision, allowing negotiated revisions before signing. Once signed, the contract is registered and held on file with COPRA.

Pricing is subject to specific protections: the trainer stressed that price must be reached through open, fair negotiation between both parties — rejecting, as an example, a scenario where a buyer who failed to honour one season’s purchase commitment (citing a bird-damaged rice crop as a hypothetical) could unilaterally impose a larger obligation the following season to compensate. The contract’s starting price is also required to sit at or above the reference price COPRA publishes on a roughly weekly basis for major crops, preventing buyers from contracting farmers below the going market rate. Contracts must additionally specify how price will be adjusted in the event of natural disasters — drought or flooding — that affect the harvest.

Once registered, implementation is subject to ongoing oversight: COPRA, working with local government authorities, monitors adherence to contract terms clause by clause and works to prevent disputes between the parties before they escalate. Neither party may unilaterally alter contract terms or transfer their obligations without the consent of both the other party and COPRA. Penalties for breach are significant: an individual found in breach faces a fine of between TZS 1 million and TZS 5 million, imprisonment of one to two years, or both, and can additionally be barred from participating in contract farming arrangements nationwide — a sanction the trainer noted extends beyond the immediate district, since the ban applies country-wide. An institution found in breach faces a fine of between TZS 5 million and TZS 10 million.

Contract registration itself carries a tiered fee schedule based on farmer or institutional scale — figures the trainer gave verbally and which are reproduced here with the caveat that several were difficult to hear precisely on the recording and are worth confirming directly with COPRA before being treated as final: a small individual farmer pays roughly TZS 10,000 to register a contract, a medium-scale individual farmer roughly TZS 20,000, and a large-scale individual farmer roughly TZS 50,000; small companies or non-cooperative institutions pay roughly TZS 20,000, rising for medium and large company-scale contract farming (the exact medium and large company figures were not clearly audible in the recording); cooperative societies and member associations are tiered by membership size, with the trainer citing roughly TZS 100,000 for cooperatives with 20–50 members, a similar band for 51–200 members, and TZS 1,000,000 for cooperatives with 201 or more members.

What this means going forward

The trainer closed by framing all four systems as sharing a single underlying purpose: creating a fair, transparent structure that protects the interests of both farmers and the buyers, processors and investors who deal with them, so that “every party stands in their rightful place and contributes to the nation’s economy and society as a whole.” He was candid that further systems remain under development to extend this formal oversight to trading relationships and border crossings not yet covered, and encouraged attendees — many of them district agricultural officers and cooperative representatives — to act as “ambassadors” for the systems described, sharing AGCOT’s livestream link with farmers who could not attend in person so the information reaches beyond the show grounds.