A Vision for Agriculture Green Growth in the Southern Agriculture Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT)

Overview

Massive opportunity for agricultural development

In 2010, the Government of Tanzania launched the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) initiative as a public-private partnership dedicated to ensuring food security, reducing poverty and spurring economic development in Tanzania’s 300,000 square kilometer Southern Corridor. While the region has considerable agricultural potential, it currently suffers from low productivity, low levels of investment, and high rates of poverty.

Blueprint missing plan to address environmental factors

To unlock the region’s potential, the SAGCOT Initiative seeks to attract more than US $3 billion of investment to greatly increase food production, increase annual farming revenues by more than US $1.2 billion, benefit small-scale farmers and the rural poor, and establish southern Tanzania as a regional food exporter. In 2011, the SAGCOT Blueprint was released, describing where and how investment in the agriculture sector could be scaled-up and better coordinated to establish productive clusters of new economic activity.

The Blueprint identified issues of climate change, environmental conservation, and natural resource management as critical to the Corridor’s long-term economic development, and smallholder farmers as key actors, but did not provide detailed plans to address them.

A ‘Greenprint’ for sustainable development

Our Framework for Agriculture Green Growth in SAGCOT (the ‘Greenprint’) refines the SAGCOT strategy to promote development in the Corridor that is environmentally sustainable, socially equitable and practical to implement. Specifically, the Greenprint lays out a strategy for ‘Agriculture Green Growth’ (AGG) to reduce poverty, improve food security and strengthen resilience to climate change that also conserves the natural resource base that supports agriculture, mitigates climate change and ensures the long-term health and values of the region’s rich forest, water and wildlife resources.