Chinese Technology improved farmers’ yields in Tanzania

Published: September 08,2023

Dr. Chuanhong Zhang

Agriculture played a very important role in China’s poverty reduction. Without the good foundation of agriculture development, it is very difficult for China to achieve industrialization. After 1978, China has achieved high growth of agricultural GDP, which contributes a lot to food security nationwide and poverty reduction in rural area.

Nowadays, China uses less than 9 percent of the world’s arable land and 6 percent of water to feed more than 20 percent of the world’s population. The self-sufficiency ratio of three staple crops—maize, rice and wheat are over 95%. The overall mechanization rate of agriculture is 72%. China is going through rapid agricultural modernization process. Compared to China, Africa has resources for agriculture development such as fertile and arable land but productivity is low and food insecurity is very common. 

Agricultural cooperation has been prioritized in China-Africa cooperation. Since 1960s, China started to dispatch agricultural experts to Africa to help Africa tackle her food insecurity issues. Hybrid rice from China helped increase rise yield in Madagascar and Uganda, rice production in Mozambique was also increased enormously using Chinese technology. 

As the top university in agriculture area, China Agricultural University (CAU) has been giving great efforts in building capacities of both smallholder farmers and professional elites in Africa. Today, I would like to share a case of poverty reduction project implemented by implemented by my university- China Agricultural University — under the leadership of Professor Li Xiaoyun. The project focuses on technology transfers to smallholder farmers in Tanzania through sharing China’s development experience. 

By sharing this case, I would like to answer two specific questions: If China’s experience is relevant to Africa, in what way it works? How can we target the smallholder farmers in Africa as poverty is concentrated in rural areas like China?

The project is name as “Small Technology, Big Harvest”. We call it “small” because it does not require high capital input and it focuses on smallholder farmers using simple technology transfer than can be copied or expanded. In 2009, Professor Li and his team from CAU went to Tanzania and learned that the maize production in Tanzania was very low compared with the yield in China. The practice of the smallholder farmers in Morogoro region was very rough. People didn’t do land preparation, no proper cultivation, not using improved seeds and no weeding, not to mention applying fertilizers and chemicals. Professor Li was thinking how he could help those farmers improve their maize production under the condition that the smallholder farmers couldn’t get much support from the local government in infrastructure and capital input. He thought of China’s experience before 1970s.

Many people ask how China developed itself when they had a small government budget in the 1960s and 70s, China used the “8 point-Charter for Agriculture”which is a holistic approach focusing on improving agricultural productivity, literally means “soil, water, seeds, fertilizer, management, density, tools and protection”. These simple technologies can be applied to African context. By doing land preparation, increasing the density, using improved seeds, weeding for a couple of times, African smallholder farmers could actually increase their yield of maize by 2-3 times. The project provided some improved seeds, small amount of fertilizer and the planting rope to the farmers who applied the technology, At the beginning,only one farmer in Peapea village applied this technology and had a good harvest. Other farmers started to learn from him after witnessing his harvest. He became the extensionist later in this village. The project organized some competition rewards for farmers who outperformed by giving them a new bicycle. And for those extensionists that can teach other farmers, the project also provided them with a motorcycle. By 2020, more than 1000 households in the Morogoro region in Tanzania have adopted this technology while others have copied it by self-learning. This has fundamentally revolutionized the maize yield practices of the area.

This is one project where you can say the smallholder farmers in this region are really harvesting a lot of maize and they established their own maize storage, so the food security problem has been addressed. However, due to the long-term single crop maize production, the soil condition in this area is not good so we encourage the local people to do inter-croppingsince 2022. We call this new product “Small beans, good nutrition”. By inter-cropping maize and soy beans, the income of the local farmers has been increased and the nutrition problem has been solved as locals have started drinking soy milk. They started to learn how to do soy milk processing and add different spices into the soy milk which has good nutrition and is rich in protein which to some extent addressed the nutrition problem in rural Africa. 

Through this project, the self-organization capability of the local people has also been increased with a very small budget as local farmers work very hard to distribute soy bean seeds and the local government also start to organize award ceremony for the most successful farmers to encourage people to grow soy beans and maize. These are the experiences embedded in Chinese experiences before the 1970s when China’s government did not have enough money to support grand infrastructure farm fields. These farmers also achieved resilience during COVID-19 and the global economic recession. They achieved food security, nutrition, land maintenance and environmental sustainability. 

Most importantly, this project has greatly increased the impression of local people on China. If you go to that area almost all farmers are very grateful regarding what’s being done. We can conclude by saying that China’s experiences in poverty alleviation, achieving food security, grain development, and infrastructure development can be shared and adopted by African countries. 

Therefore, when applying Chinese experiences into African context, the local conditions, different development phases need to be taken into consideration and a tailored approach embedded into China’s experience works better for African countries. 

Dr. Chuanhong Zhang is a professor at China Agricultural University