Leigh McAlea, Head of Communications, from the UK charity, TRAID talks about growing cotton without pesticides in Ethiopia, which has also revived the local bee population and had a positive knock-on-effect for the farmers.
While cotton growing and ginning is a top agricultural export industry in Tanzania, the sector has been struggling for the past 50 years. As a result, Tanzania’s half a million smallholder cotton farmers in the Lake Zone, the region southeast of Lake Victoria where most cotton is produced, remain impoverished. The poverty rate in Tanzania was 26.8 percent in 2016. Improving the Tanzanian economy, which relies on the cotton sector, is essential to further reduce the poverty rate and improving livelihoods.
