- Milk Week - Promoting Milk Consumption By Makuna Chirimi Milk consumption in the country remains relatively low despite Tanzania ranking third in terms of livestock population in Africa. This is why the Tanzania Dairy Board in collaboration with The Ministry of Livestock Development and Fisheries and other stakeholders in the industry decided to promote a milk drinking culture among Tanzanians by introducing the Milk Week, an annual event aimed at increasing consumption of milk and milk products. The annual national event is celebrated in the final week of May. This year, the Milk Week starts tomorrow and last till Tuesday of next week. The occasion will be marked in Dare s Sala…

- No Post Harvest Milk Loss in Tanzania – TDB Claims By Makuna Chirimi There are no post harvest milk losses in the country, the Registrar of the Tanzania Dairy Board, Charles Mutagabwa has said. Contrary to widely circulated information and survey reports which indicate that close to 40% of all milk harvested in Tanzania goes to waste, the registrar has dismissed this as a matter of perception. “Show me a farmer who has failed to sell his milk and I will show them where to sell it. All the local processors are searching for milk and are unable to get enough. If there was excess milk being produced it would quickly be bought up,” the registrar said. Elaborating fu…

- Drink Milk for Good Health. Build Tanzania’s Economy.By Makuna Chirimi Tanzanians have been urged to drink more milk both for their own good health and as a way of supporting the country’s economy. “We have made some progress from the 21 litres per person that was registered when we started this drive in 1998. However we are stuck on 20% of what should be the appropriate level of consumption and obviously still have a long way to go,” the Registrar of the Tanzania Dairy Board, Charles Mutagwaba admits. One of the ways to address this is through the Milk Week, with the highlight this year being the Milk and Milk Products Exhibition slotted for the 28th – 3…

- By Makuna Chirimi Egypt, Sudan and Congo DRC have been urged to come on board and sign on the controversial Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) that aims to give seven upstream countries equal rights to use of the Nile waters. The CFA seeks to strip the historical rights that Egypt and Sudan enjoyed over the Nile waters, where courtesy of a colonial era agreement Egypt wielded rights over 90% of the Nile waters with the remainder flowing to Sudan. A Nile Discourse Forum held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia has however jointly expressed appreciation for the content of the CFA, terming it principled, just and providing a legal basis for fair sharing and utilization of the Nile. ‘The…

- By Makuna Chirimi Ripples are emerging in usually tranquil waters of the Great Nile. “We do not have any comment on this. We have not been instructed to say anything,” an official from the Egyptian Embassy in Dar es Salaam responded to queries for comment on the new developments. This follows Burundi’s signing of the Nile ‘Cooperative Framework Agreement’ (CFA) that paved way for the ratification of a new treaty that seeks to strip Egypt of its long-held rights to the Nile. With Burundi joining Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Kenya in the deal, Egypt now appears to have lost its veto power on rights to Nile waters. A 1929 colonial treaty with B…

- By Makuna Chirimi PEOPLE have known for centuries that children resemble their parents. Gregor Mendel, an 18th century Czech monk is who discovered how to mathematically predict which traits parents would hand down to their offspring. This discovery revolutionized agriculture and marked the beginning of modern genetic science. It also shed light on the process of evolution. The microscope that Mendel used still exists. He used it to observe single-grain pollination with the pollen magnified 179 times which disproved theories by Charles Darwin and others that one grain of pollen was not enough to fertilize a plant. Armed with this knowledge, genetic scientists across the globe are fin…

- By Makuna Chirimi In the olden days before glass and plastic, a certain son of a carpenter allegedly turned water into wine. The Carpenter’s Son however warned of the double perils of putting new wine in old wineskins - that no one puts new wine into old wineskins because the new wine will burst the old skins and it will be spilled, and the wineskins destroyed. Our latter day marketers have however found shortcuts around this ancient headache - simply re-brand the product! With a fine stroke of the “photoshop” brush, the creative director at the advertising agency changes the size and colour of the wineskins. The tongue twisting script writer somehow rhymes the words o…

- STANDARDS USELESS WITHOUT ENFORCEMENT By Makuna Chirimi It is the typical early morning scenario in our office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and the number of people buying and eating chapati, maandazi (wheat buns), vitumbua (rice buns), mihogo ya kukaanga (oil fried cassava) and such delicacies by far exceeds those munching on bread as an accompaniment to their early morning cup of tea. This scenario is replayed in other offices, homes and across the length and breadth of the city and the country. A fortnight or so ago, a rather disturbing warning to customers of an up-market bakery in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to abstain from purchasing bread and other confectionaries from the food cha…

- WHY IS CEMENT PACKAGED BETTER THAN GRAIN IN TANZANIA? By Makuna Chirimi LAX standards in grain packaging and transportation contribute to the huge post harvest losses that occur in Tanzania every year. Of focal concern is the packaging of food crops from farm to market or end user (manufacturer or consumer). Casting a glance at the existing standards regime in Tanzania reveals that the packaging of cement is perhaps better regulated than packaging of grains. How do we value something that goes into walls more than something that goes into our own bodies, you ask? By admission of a player in the packaging industry, the quality of packaging of grain in the country has deteriorated dr…

- ARE CEMENT MANUFACTURERS CUTTING COSTS OR CUTTING CORNERS? By Makuna Chirimi THREE local cement manufacturers have so far failed to confirm or refute claims that poor packaging of their cement is responsible for the reduced weight of cement sold in parts of the country. The big-three of Tanzanian cement, Twiga Cement Ltd, Mbeya Cement Company and Tanga Cement Company were asked to respond to accusations that poor packaging of cement may be unnecessarily exposing suppliers and consumers of cement to potentially fatal health hazards. The Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) specifications for cement bags (TZS 623 and TZS 743) stipulate that cement bags should have a nominal holding capac…