Sunny future for sunflower seed farmers

Rucodia Company Limited is a farmer led business established in October 2011 by 2.266 smallholder farmers and Rucodia NGO. The company operates as a cooperative. The objective is to address the challenges met by sunflower growers in their accessibility to sowing seed of good quality, transport of their sunflower harvest, seed processing, oil packaging and marketing of the standardized products like paked oil and sunflower seed cake. The company is organized in 82 groups and 11 farmer associations all based in the Ruvuma region in the Southern part of Tanzania. The 11 farmer associations own 66% of the shares, Rucodia NGO currently (March 2014) owns 34% of the shares. The company is now (March 2014) still being managed by the Executive Director of Rucodia NGO, however in the 2nd quarter of 2014 all responsibilities should be handed over to the company. The company already set up their own seed processing and oil packaging unit in Songea Town and started in July 2013 with buying and processing seeds. They have been processing up till February 2014 and are currently (March 2014) out of stock. As of April they can start with procurement of seeds again from farmers as the harvest season starts by the end of March. Depending on the volume of the procured seeds, the factory can be operational for 10 months. Rucodia NGO is an NGO started in 2004 and registered in 2005. As off 2006 the NGO has been carrying out supply chain analysis and sunflower seed flower came out of the analysis as one area where the incomes of small holder farmers could be improved. They sensitized members, looked for the entrepreneurial ones, formed village associations, creating collection centers and were able to convince government to invest in local expellers at village level. They got 13 expeller for 13 villages. However because of challenges at village level, like maintenance and reparations of the expellers at the villages (located all over Ruvuma area), the NGO decided to form a cooperative structure with one big processing unit. Rucodia has been supported since 2007 by Miserio (German Bischop) and SNV started to support them since last year. Now Rucodia Company Ltd is almost an independent unit, they are now looking at different value chains like ginger, dairy and sesame, where they would like to set up the same structure (sensitization, form village associations/cooperative and start processing to increase income) as they used for the sun flower seed business.