TANZANIAN farmers have been asked to start using the fertiliser produced locally by the Intracom factory to encourage investment in the fertiliser sub-sector and reduce importation.

Industry and Trade Minister, Dr Selemani Jafo made the call here over the weekend on a visit to inspect the production of fertilizers at the factory.

He said that it can produce one million tonnes per year and the demand for fertilizers in the country according to the Ministry of Agriculture is 700,000 tonnes.

"In the information, I saw that there was a production of 76,000 tonnes, and out of that 60,000 tonnes were sold and only 4,000 tonnes were sold in this country, I am not happy with this situation as the President struggled to bring this factory to the country, as the Minister of Industry I will not accept at all that his efforts are wasted.

"I am unhappy with this trend; we are making big investments in the agricultural sector. The President has increased the agricultural budget from 294bn/- to 1.2trn/-. The President has huge ambitions. I should ask Tanzanians to use the fertilizer from this factory," he said.

He said the factory's investment is already more than 500bn/- and construction is still going on in other areas and it is expected that the investment will be more than 1trn/-.

"The factory currently has 907 employees and more than 600 are Tanzanians, and when it is completed it can employ 3,000 to 4,000 people, it is impossible for fertiliser to be produced here and not bought in Tanzania. This is hindering the President, why should we buy fertiliser from other places outside the country but fail to buy it here in the country? "

"I, the Minister of Industry, will not agree at all to see factories being built in Tanzania fail to be empowered to do this great work, we as the government will discuss how to make the factories built in the country work well," he said.

In addition, he assured the investors that he would manage to ensure that the industries invested in the country meet the expectations of the President.

"We will protect our industries here in the country so that they work well and our young people get jobs and the mission of President Samia to struggle to find investors must be fulfilled," he said.

The Technical Director of the Intracom Factory, Eng. Victor Ngendazi, said that the factory started to be built in July 2021 and the goal was to make 600,000 tonnes of fertilizer, but due to the request of the Tanzanian government, they have increased it to one million tonnes.

"Currently, the construction is continuing on the remaining areas. We want this area to have five factories and three are already working and the production will generally start in August this year after completing the tests of the two factories," he said.

He said that they have been working with the government to solve the challenges facing them and stressed that the production capacity is sufficient.

"The challenge we have is the time of sales, in Tanzania we have sold 4000 tonnes of the tonnes produced while Kenya has bought 52,000 tonnes and Burundi 10,000 tonnes, you can see that in Tanzania we are very far behind, we ask that in the government's strategies to protect local industries, subsidies should not go too much to foreign fertilizers come to the factories invested in this country," he said.