As part of Unite’s Social Impact Work (SIW) with the Unite Food Program (UFP), we have committed to purchasing this harvest season a minimum of 1,000 100-kg bags of crops from small-scale farming families across Tanzania.
Harvest season in Tanzania has begun, and our UFP field coordinators in the Kitavi and Rukwa regions are busy meeting with hundreds of pre-vetted small-scale farming families, delivering them Agro-Z hermetic grain storage bags (also called “anti-famine bags”) and purchasing from them at fair market rates rice, maize, ground nuts, and beans, all of which is first carefully checked to ensure the food meets UFP’s strict quality-control criteria.
Most of the rural families with whom Unite works farm just two and a half to five acres. Unable to afford quality seeds or fertilizers, yields are often low and families may have just one to 10 bags to sell (beyond the few they hold back to feed their families). Children in these villages often must skip school to assist with the harvest as there is no money for hired labor. It is a life riddled with hardship, hunger, and unimaginable struggles.
To see images of our field coordinators at work in Rukwa and Katavi, click on the gallery below. To see a short video of how our partner SIW small-scale farmers beat their corn by hand to remove the kernels from the husks, click HERE.
These small-scale farming families are extremely grateful to UFP for providing them with a safe, secure, and fair market as well as Agro-Z bags.
“Now that I have the anti-famine bags from Unite, I will no longer have to buy and apply pesticides to try and save my maize.”
— UFP partner farmer Mrs. Nakalinga, Nankanga village, Rukwa Region, Tanzania
Once purchased, crops are transported from the rural villages in Western Tanzania across the country to UFP HQ in the easternmost city of Dar es Salaam. There the food is sorted, cleaned, processed, and re-packaged before being delivered to wholesale and retail customers. Click HERE to see a video of UFP’s production process and click HERE to see a video of UFP’s package goods being loaded on small boats bound for customers in Zanzibar.
