
Theophord C. Ndunguru is the head of the Tanzania Smallholder’s Tea Development Agency.
The backbone of Tanzania’s tea industry is its small growers, but like their counterparts worldwide, they are under rising pressure. To help them flourish, the government channels support services and programs through the Tanzania Smallholders Tea Development Agency, headed by Theophord C. Ndunguru since 2019. Before becoming director general of the TSHTDA, he worked for 11 years as director of promotion, monitoring, and evaluation at the Tea Board of Tanzania.
Ndunguru holds an MBA from the Eastern and Southern Africa Management Institute, Dar es Salaam Campus. He also earned a master’s degree in soil science and land management and a bachelor’s in general agriculture from the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro.
With 68 million people, Tanzania is the third-largest tea producer in Africa. The economy is mainly agricultural. Smallholders farm 48% of the country’s 23,800 hectares under tea. Data from the Tea Board of Tanzania (TBT) indicate that the 32,000 tea smallholders collectively produce about 40% of Tanzania’s green leaf. Ndunguru told STiR about the government’s efforts to keep these growers on track.
What is the Tanzanian tea sector’s overall situation?
The tea industry in Tanzania is currently going through several challenges and constraints. However, the government of Tanzania has started taking very strong and robust measures to make sure all these challenges are sorted out.
One of the key challenges affecting Tanzania in general — not only in the tea industry — is the change of weather. We used to have no more than five months of drought. But that period has increased to almost seven months, critically affecting the tea industry in Tanzania in terms of production volume and quality.
The government has just started taking measures to ensure we start building irrigation schemes near various smallholder tea block farms. The Tanzania Agriculture Research Institute has undertaken irrigation research in tea, and the result portents that irrigation significantly improves quality and increases production.
The National Irrigation Commission of Tanzania has set aside funds and engaged contractors as pilots to erect irrigation systems for smallholder farms in the Njombe Region. We expect that after the irrigation has started, production will increase by almost 40%. And we hope the tea produced from irrigated land will be high quality. That’s one of the key challenges affecting the industry in Tanzania.
What is Tanzania doing to ensure that adequate processing facilities are in place to support smallholders?
Smaller farmers do not own the tea processing factories — they just sell their green leaf as it is plucked to private factories belonging to private companies. Because of that, smaller farmers cannot be the final decision makers as far as quality is concerned because, in the value chain, they’re just engaging in the production side of green leaf, selling it to someone else who will be able to control the quality of the end products.
We thank the government and the development partners, particularly CARE International in Tanzania and Kazi Yetu, the tea brand, for their initiatives to erect one orthodox tea processing factory, a specialty factory built in Korogwe, which will be eventually handed over to smallholder tea farmers.
That factory will be a model for all the smallholder farmers in Tanzania to construct similar tea processing factories that will allow smaller farmers to control the value chain from production all the way to the market.
What about ensuring access to agricultural chemicals?
The government has taken very strong initiatives to sort out the issue of input supply to smallholder farmers. During the Covid period, fertilizer prices went over the roof. So the farmers were not able to purchase them. Now, the government has decided to sort it out by offering subsidies on fertilizers. The result is that both smaller tea farmers and large estates have started using those inputs, particularly fertilizers, so the crop production volume will increase.
What about quality?
The quality is also going to be improved. So, I can say that the government’s commitment to ensure that the tea industry is turned around is very strong.
Capacity is a significant challenge, which is currently affecting the industry because of the erratic weather conditions in peak season and the low season. During high season, the existing tea processing factories in Tanzania do not have the capacity to absorb all the crop that is offered during that time. So, much of the crop is left unharvested, or once it is harvested, it might be lost. So, we have the so-called post-harvest losses of tea.
The Tea Board has directed all tea processing factories to ensure that they increase capacity and operate efficiently to accommodate all the crop during the high season. Another thing for smaller farmers is that we have started taking measures to ensure that we build satellite factories to absorb excess crop during high crop season so that all the crop is processed.
Kenya has an extensive farmer field school program conducted by field extension officers to support small growers. Is there something comparable in Tanzania?
Tanzania has one of the most robust extension systems in the tea industry. TSHTDA has employed highly qualified extension officers who provide specialized tea extension services to smallholder farmers. We have signed an MoU with private companies and cooperatives in the southern tea growing areas in a public-private partnership arrangement whereby the private sector provides the extension officers a top-up to cover housing, transport, and communication.
Extension officers are given specific areas to provide extension services; they are given smart performance targets, or KPIs; and they are evaluated to see if they deliver to the organization’s expectations. Currently, we have a shortage of staff, so we are working with the government to ensure that more staff are employed so that we can replicate such an arrangement in other remaining areas.
In many tea lands, especially in Africa, there is an oversupply of cut, tear, and curl (CTC) grades, dragging on prices. What can remedy this?
Global tea production is far higher than global tea consumption. And because of that, tea prices globally have either remained constant or are declining over time. In the future, we expect there will be a crash because the cost of production is constantly increasing while the prices emanating from tea are declining. The solution to this challenge is to improve the quality of tea to meet export market demands and to increase local consumption.
I attended one international meeting where the challenge of oversupply of tea was highly debated. During that meeting, participants had two suggestions. One was to limit global production. Each country should limit the amount of tea produced for export. The other option was to enhance local tea consumption. But many of the meeting participants highly contested the first option as it was going against the individual countries’ tea production targets.
Furthermore, it was articulated that the meeting had no legal mandate directing respective countries to reduce their tea production targets. It was therefore consented that each country should work hard to make sure that it promotes local tea consumption, such that a big chunk of tea is consumed locally.