British company plans training for EA's fish farmers

UK-based Farm Africa intends to educate fish farmers in East African countries boost their production through training in good management practices.
The project aims at addressing challenges in fish farming through classroom sessions and subsequent practicals on-farm lessons.
Arnoud Meijberg, head of the initiative at UK-based Farm Africa, says that due to rapid population growth, natural water bodies can no longer produce sufficient fish to satisfy the growing market demand.

“It will help with food security and generate income for farmers if they do it in the right way,” he said during an interview with SciDev.Net early this month
Through the programme, smallholder farmers learn how to construct good fish ponds, identify quality fingerlings for stocking, use quality feeds for enhanced production, and price their farm produce.
“If farmers have good fingerlings but substandard feeds and poor business skills, then they are bound to fail in aquaculture production and make losses,” Meijberg explains.
The four-year programme funded by Farm Africa began in 2016 and aims to help at least 1,100 fish farmers commercialise.
It has already trained more than 1,000 fish farmers in Kenya while reaching about 8,000 indirectly through media campaigns, agricultural trade fairs and aquaculture symposiums.
Plans are under way to expand the initiative to other East African countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda.
“I now know the right quantities and types of feed to give my fish,” says David Omuruli, who has six fish ponds and has benefitted from the training sessions. “I’ve also become good at record keeping which enables me to track all my expenses and avoid unnecessary wastage.”
He is now imparting the knowledge to other farmers. Samuel Kariuki, director of the Centre for Microbiology Research at the Kenya Medical Research Institute, says that unhygienic practices and crowded conditions in fishponds usually contribute to the misuse of antibiotics for disease prevention and growth promotion in aquaculture.

TBL hit hard by viroba ban, to retrench workers

THE fall-out from last month’s ban on sachet-packed liquor known as ‘viroba’ has continued with Tanzania Breweries Limited (TBL) yesterday disclosing plans to retrench a sizeable chunk of workers at its subsidiary Tanzania Distilleries Limited (TDL) company.
Reliable sources within TBL, the country’s largest producer of alcoholic beverages, confirmed to The Guardian that a key reason for the retrenchments is the ‘viroba’ ban which has left TDL liquor-packaging machines lying idle and their operators virtually out of work.
TDL was the sole manufacturer of acceptable sachet-packed liquor which, along with a good number of ‘fake’ brands whose sources remain dubious, have all been roped into the blanket ban which took effect from March 1.

According to a joint TBL-TDL statement issued yesterday, the retrenchment exercise will affect at least 50 employees across the entire group.
“After considering all options available, both long term and short term to reduce the impact and extent of our (internal) restructuring, ultimately retrenchment is one of the viable options for the sustainability of (our) business,” reads part of the statement.
The exercise is said to have started on Monday this week (March 27). Efforts to contact TBL head of corporate communications Georgia Mutaghywa for further clarification proved futile as her phone went unanswered for the better part of yesterday.
Apart from TDL, a good number of licensed private ‘viroba’ factories have been forced to close down as a result of the ban on locally-produced or imported alcohol in sachets, which is intended to complement a government push for a switch from hard liquor sachet packaging to bottling technology.
Businesses depending on ‘viroba’ and their customers also appear to have been caught between a rock and a hard place by the ban, which was also aimed at enabling the government to curb tax evasion.
It is estimated that about 600 billion/- is lost through tax evasion due to production and packaging of the hard liquor in plastic sachets. The sachets have also been blamed for increased intake of alcohol even among school-going minors.
The government is currently drafting regulations on the packaging of hard liquor requiring producers, among others, to pack the drinks in returnable bottles of not less than 250 milligrams.