Zimbabwe: Tobacco Research Board Sets Up Floating Tray Manufacturing Plant

Source from:  The Herald (Harare) 16 July 2007 07/17/2007

As the deadline to ban use of methyl bromide in fumigating tobacco seedbeds fast approaches, the Tobacco Research Board says it has set up a plant to manufacture floating trays for use by farmers when the current donor-assisted programme to provide these for free ends this year. TRB divisional manager Mr Meanwell Gudu said in an interview yesterday that the board had finished setting up a plant with capacity to produce at least 200 float trays per hour. "We will be commissioning the plant within the next two weeks," he said. In terms of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, use of methyl bromide will be curtailed and eventually eliminated in 2015. Mr Gudu said the tobacco industry had three alternatives to methyl bromide in seedbed fumigation, namely the burning option that entailed burning land where tobacco would have been grown the previous year to kill pests; the chemical option where a chemical called EDB is used in a combination with a herbicide; and the non-chemical way of using float bed trays. He said since EDB would be phased out in soil fumigation in the United States and other countries starting from this year, and its manufacture and supply would be limited, the TRB had resolved to adopt the float bed tray system as an environmentally cleaner option of seedling production. "Tobacco will continue to be a major crop in Zimbabwe, produced mainly for export, so its production practices have to be sensitive to the needs of the market, in line with good agricultural practices as determined and dictated by the needs of the major markets in China, Europe and USA," he said. Mr Gudu said the float tray system was an option of seedling production that had been tried, tested and used successfully in many tobacco growing countries such as Brazil, Malawi and the US. He said because of the comparatively high entry costs in float tray seedling production, the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation was currently offering, through TRB, free trays and plastics to growers as well as training them in their use. The UNIDO project was aimed at phasing out 50 ozone-depleting potential tonnes of methyl bromide by December 2007, an amount that was equivalent to 85 tonnes of methyl bromide usage in tobacco seedling production. To date, 6 790 growers have been trained to use the float bed trays since inception of the programme in July last year, said Mr Gudu. Of these, 1 334 were trained last year while 5 481 have been trained so far this year. While the TRB had targeted to contract 4 414 growers to grow seedlings using the float bed system by December this year, it had so far trained 5 633 growers. Enditem