Fertiliser Firm Opts for Foreign Market

The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)

Wallace Mhando

1 May 2011

The Minjingu fertiliser company has opted for export markets for its products after the government failed to settle a Sh9 billion debt it owed the company.Mr Tosky Hans, the company’s managing director, said the outstanding debt is for the past two farming seasons and that pleas to have it paid have failed.

Reporters who visited the plant located in Babati District, Manyara Region, last week found tonnes of fertiliser bags being loaded on trucks heading to the neighbouring countries.Most of them were transporting the fertiliser through the Namanga border post for marketing in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea, according to Mr Hans.

The fertiliser is also in high demand in Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia and other countries in southern Africa, he said.The company CEO added that they were opting for the outside markets because the government has failed to buy the fertilisers to supply local farmers.

Under an arrangement struck by the two sides when the plant resumed production five years ago, the government was to buy the fertilisers and sell it to farmers at subsidized price.”The system has never worked as anticipated. As of now the government owed us some Sh 9 billion it has failed to pay us during the past two seasons,” he pointed out.

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes are now being exported, especially to the neigbouring countries where the demand is said to be high.Mr Hans said the option to export its products abroad was reached by the management in a bid to rescue the plant from collapse due to high operational costs.

The move was also taken in order to sustain jobs of hundreds of local employees and raise money to pay banks loans taken to revive production.The once state-run factory, was privatised in 2001 after it stopped production in the 1990s.Mr Hans elaborated that the government had earlier intended to buy all the fertiliser for local supply under the Agriculture Sector Development Programme (ASDP) launched five years ago.

According to him, the company supplied the input to district councils in Mbeya, Rukwa, Kigoma, Morogoro, Kilimanjaro and Manyara regions.Others were the local authorities in Iringa, Ruvuma, Arusha, Tabora and Mara regions. The Mjinjingu plant had plans to increase its production capacity to 150,000 tonnes of fertilizer per year.

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