Socio-economic determinants of smallholder farmers sisal productivity and profitability: a case of Korogwe District, Tanzania

Abstract

Tanzania’s sisal industry employs about 100 000 individuals with its current total production estimated at 40 000 tons per year. This follows efforts by the Tanzania’s Sisal Board (TSB) to promote smallholder farmers participation in the sisal industry. However, there is a lack of enough information on socio-economic determinants associated with smallholder farmers’ sisal productivity and profitabilty. Therefore, the study was conducted to address the above. Specifically, the study aimed at identifying determinants of the smallholder farmers’ sisal productivity and profitability in the study area. A cross-sectional research design was used in the research whereby data were collected from 150 randomly selected smallholder sisal producing households based on registers availed by estate managers in Ngombezi and Mwelya Wards. Primary data were collected through questionnaire with close and open ended questions. In addition, focus group discussions and key informant interviews were used to gather complementary data. Quantitative data from the questionnaires were analyzed using the IBM-SPSS software whereby descriptive (ie. ferequencies and percentages) and inferential statistics(through the use of simple linear regression) were determined. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic content analysis whereby collected information were summarized based on themes and objectives of the study. Generally, study findings show that factors significantly associated with the smallholder sisal farmers’ productivity were amount of land allocated to sisal production and amount of sisal harvested (P≤0.001) and amount of land owned by household (P≤0.05). On the other hand, factors associated with the sisal famers profitability included sex of the household head (P≤0.1), farm size (P≤0.05) and amount of sisal harvested (P≤0.001). Therefore, the study recommends that agricultural and investment banks should consider financing smallholder sisal farmers so as to enable them raise their incomes and capital needed for sisal production in order to increase sisal productivity and profitability.