By Charles Mwangi
Tanzania achieved food self-sufficiency in 2025. It is a milestone worth celebrating — the country now produces enough food to feed its population and is targeting a 150 percent self-sufficiency ratio by 2030 to enable exports. Public investment in agriculture has quadrupled in four years, from TZS 294 billion in 2021/22 to TZS 1,243 billion in 2025/26.
And yet, the picture beneath those headlines is more complicated.
Tanzania’s average maize yields stand at 1.91 tonnes per hectare — compared to 11.13 in the United States, 6.53 in China, and 3.92 in Ethiopia. Average rice yields are 2.99 tonnes per hectare, against 8.72 in Egypt and 7.13 in China. The land productivity growth rate has been estimated at less than 0.4 percent per year. According to the 2019/20 Agriculture Census, only one third of farmers use improved seed, one fifth apply inorganic fertilizer, and just 2.5 percent of cultivated land is irrigated.
Sufficiency has been achieved largely through land expansion rather than productivity growth — a path that leads to degradation, not development. Tanzania’s transformation, to be durable, needs to be different.
Climate change compounds the challenge. Economic losses from climate impacts on agriculture are estimated at USD 200 million per annum, with unpredictable rainfall, more frequent droughts, rising temperatures, and changing precipitation patterns all affecting both crops and livestock. Meanwhile, more than 30 percent of children under five suffer stunted growth, and 7.8 percent of the population remains malnourished — not because food is unavailable, but because poverty limits access to diverse, nutritious diets.
A new PFADC policy brief tackles these contradictions by looking outward — examining what countries that successfully transformed their agricultural sectors actually did, and how Tanzania can apply those lessons.
The cases are instructive. In India, the NABARD Seed Value Chain model helped farmers increase paddy yields by 30 percent per acre through targeted credit, capacity building, and infrastructure for seed testing. In Israel, drip irrigation and water recycling produced a 70 percent reduction in water use, enabling productivity in arid conditions. In Kenya, Safaricom’s DigiFarm platform enrolled over one million farmers, providing bundled access to agricultural inputs, credit, insurance, and real-time market information.
Tanzania has its own success to build on: the Farmer Field and Business School (FFBS) model, developed by CARE and adopted by the Ministry of Agriculture, has demonstrated yield increases of 20–30 percent, income improvements of about 18 percent, and an estimated return of USD 31 for every USD 1 invested.
The brief calls for scaling these approaches systematically — through domestic fertilizer manufacturing, accelerated implementation of seed and soil health strategies, expanded digital advisory services, targeted fiscal incentives for agro-processing investors, and a coordinated communication strategy to improve agriculture’s public profile. Media houses, the brief notes, have poor coverage of agriculture — and there is a need for a coordinated strategy to change that.
The gap between Tanzania’s potential and its current performance is not a mystery. The tools to close it — many of them already piloted — are waiting to be applied at scale.
Read the full Policy Brief No. 3, 2025 — “Best International Practices for Efficient Agricultural Transformation” — attached below.