Ahead of the 10th Africa Agri Expo in Dar es Salaam, AGCOT chief Geoffrey Kirenga argues that Tanzania’s drive for 10% annual agricultural growth will rise or fall on whether it carries smallholder farmers with it. A panel of the country’s farm leaders set out how.

DAR ES SALAAM — Tanzania’s plan to grow agriculture by at least 10% a year on the road to Vision 2050 cannot be built around large investors alone, the head of the AGCOT Centre, Geoffrey Kirenga, told a pre-event webinar for the 10th Africa Agri Expo 2026. His message was blunt: in a sector where the majority of output still comes from smallholders, inclusion is not charity but commercial logic.

“There is no business in agriculture if it is not inclusive,” Kirenga said. If you sell inputs, fertiliser, agrochemicals or seed, he noted, most of your customers are smallholder farmers — so a business environment that lets those farmers grow is the same environment that lets agribusiness grow.

It was the organising idea of a discussion, convened online by TAB Group, that drew together a regulator, the private sector’s apex body, a consultant and a research leader to preview the expo’s theme: unlocking Tanzania’s agricultural potential through investment, innovation and opportunity. The main event runs on 2–3 September 2026 in Dar es Salaam.

Five factors, one precondition

Asked what it would take to accelerate agribusiness and value-chain growth, Kirenga — who introduced AGCOT (formerly SAGCOT) as a public–private partnership promoting responsible agricultural investment — named five factors: an enabling policy environment; infrastructure spanning roads, railways, airports and seaports; access to affordable finance; the ability to reach farmers and aggregate their produce to market; and human capital across the whole value chain, not just farmers but financiers, transporters, cold-storage operators and crop-protection and marketing specialists.

Of the five, he singled out policy as the precondition. Without supportive laws, legislation and institutions, he argued, investment simply does not take place. On finance, he was pointed: conventional banks are poorly suited to agriculture, so the country needs investment banks, locally mobilised capital and inward investment to fill the gap.

In a second intervention, Kirenga set AGCOT’s own work against the Vision 2050 target. With smallholders’ share of production falling from above 76% toward roughly 54–60%, he said, AGCOT’s job is to make the transformation inclusive, food-secure and sustainable. He summarised the approach as creating the structural conditions for smallholder commercial viability — through corridor- and cluster-level partnership “compacts” that align government and private actors around specific value chains — while advancing inclusive business models, climate-smart practices that build soil health and drought resilience, and targeted initiatives to pull youth into production, marketing, processing and value addition.

The private sector’s ask: predictable policy and lighter taxes

Mark Magila, Executive Director of the Agricultural Council of Tanzania (ACT), picked up the private-sector thread. ACT, the sector’s apex body, represents value-chain actors across crops, livestock and fisheries, and Magila said private operators are already driving modernisation — widening access to inputs, financing and digital tools, cutting post-harvest losses and pushing smallholders from subsistence toward commercial agribusiness.

But growth, he argued, is being held back by tax and regulatory unpredictability. He cited repeated reversals on edible-oil import duties — cut to attract domestic crushing one year, restored to protect urban consumers the next — as the kind of back-and-forth that wrecks long-term planning in a sector that needs long horizons. Working with partners including AGCOT in the sector’s policy analysis group, ACT is advocating a lower corporate tax, a cut in the agricultural withholding tax from 2% to 1%, and a VAT reduction from 18% to 16%, alongside formalising the roughly nine million smallholder households still largely outside the tax net. Magila pointed to gains he attributed to private-sector effort: food self-sufficiency above 130%, agricultural exports of around US$4 billion, and roughly 11% annual growth in horticulture, a subsector led heavily by women and youth.

Tea: the case for value addition

Beatrice J. Banzi, Director General of the Tea Board of Tanzania, set out a subsector under pressure. Tanzanian tea leans almost entirely on CTC black tea, which is oversupplied globally, depressing prices and morale among growers. Add poor irrigation uptake, weak agronomy and limited awareness of certification, and farmers are left exposed to whatever the processor — their primary buyer — decides to pay.

Banzi’s answer was sustainability through value addition. A farmer selling raw green leaf earns about 366 Tanzanian shillings; with processing and value addition, she said, the same tea can fetch from upwards of US$1 to about US$2.5. Meeting the requirements of schemes such as Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade certification, she added, both opens markets and rewards environmentally sound production — making value addition and sustainability two sides of the same coin.

The untapped prize: processing

Michael Paul, Lead Consultant at Kamprad Consulting — who opened by crediting Kirenga as a mentor and “father of agricultural transformation” — framed the sector’s biggest opportunity as the one Tanzania keeps exporting. In the 2024/25 season, he said, the country produced around half a million tonnes of cashew worth roughly half a billion dollars in exports, but about 76% left in raw form for Vietnam and India, where it is processed and resold into European markets at several times the price Tanzanian farmers received. Vietnam, by comparison, earned billions from processed cashew over the same period.

The fix, Paul argued, is to capture that processing at home. He pointed to a government-backed processing park in the southern cashew belt, supported by roughly US$130 million, as an opening for investors, agri-finance, insurers and logistics firms alike. He also made the case for the off-taker model — a processor or aggregator that contracts smallholders, guarantees their groups to lenders and unlocks affordable finance against a reliable market — as the structure most likely to lift scattered smallholders, citing a working example in the Lake Zone’s Kahama area. With China opening duty-free access for African goods and Tanzania sitting inside both the EAC and SADC markets, he said, the country’s roughly 44 million hectares of arable land and its continued cooking-oil imports point to opportunities that remain, for now, largely untapped.

Research that is already moving yields

The clearest evidence of innovation came from Dr Shadrack Jacob Mbapila, Centre Director and Senior Research Officer at TARI Ukiriguru in Mwanza, which leads national research on cotton, roots and tubers. Through the institute’s TARICASS cassava series — with TARICASS 4 now dominant in the Lake Zone — farmers have moved from local varieties yielding five to six tonnes to improved, disease-resistant material capable of up to 30 tonnes per hectare, with built-in resistance to cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) and cassava mosaic disease (CMD). In cotton, the institute’s UKM08 variety, which replaced the older UK91, has lifted yields substantially, and new plant spacing developed with Brazil’s agricultural cooperation — the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC) and Embrapa — has pushed some farmers’ cotton far above traditional levels.

Mbapila also pointed to digital tools: a planting-calendar service that uses citizen-science soil and moisture data to send farmers SMS advice on when to plant, locally invented planters now adapted from cotton to sunflower and maize, and AI-based disease detection. On the latter he singled out work by the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Arusha, whose KilimoAI application — developed by Dr Neema Mduma and her team — lets farmers identify maize and banana diseases from a leaf photo. Technology adoption, he argued, is what has carried Tanzania from food deficit to surplus, and it is what will help farmers cope as climate change brings new pests and diseases.

The road to September

The throughline across the panel was AGCOT’s: that policy, finance, research and processing only add up if smallholders are inside the deal rather than outside it. Moderator Rashida Zafur of TAB Group closed by pointing participants toward the 10th Africa Agri Expo on 2–3 September 2026 in Dar es Salaam, where, the panellists agreed, the conversation moves from preview to the show floor.

Reporting based on the Africa Agri Expo 2026 pre-event webinar convened by TAB Group. Figures and statements are as presented by the speakers. Recording.