A maize farm. PHOTO | FILE | NMG

Tanzania has opened grain storage facilities in Juba to facilitate the sale of its surplus food crops into the country.

This was revealed by Tanzania’s Minister of Agriculture, Hussein Bashe early this week.

In a twitter handle, minister Bashe said, his country has also to open another facility in Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa after South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, respectively.

According to him, Tanzania recently launched an ambitious food surplus creation scheme called the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania.

“The Tanzanian already delivered 400 tons of grains to Juba. This is all in efforts to enable Tanzanian farmers and traders to get good markets for their products.” Bashe wrote in a statement.

Bashe said his government has allocated 350,000 hectares of land in the country’s fertile southern highlands region for farming.

The area is where the grains such maize, paddy, wheat, sorghum, millet, cassava, beans, sweet potatoes and bananas are being produced for export in the region.

He added that the crop storage facilities in the two countries will be used by both the Tanzanian Government and the Private Sector.

Bashe believed South Sudan, DR Congo and Kenya have a reliable market for their Tanzanian produce.

Experts say South Sudan is an arable land and 98 percent of it is fertile.

But since the country gained independence in 2011, it has been relying on food produced from the region, mainly Uganda.