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This post originally appeared on the IFPRI.org blog and the GSSP blog. 

It is no secret that fertilizer subsidies are back in vogue across Africa south of the Sahara as the preferred tool for governments trying to boost incomes of poor smallholder farmers by increasing farm production and agricultural productivity. The financial burden of fertilizer subsidies is also widely recognized, exacerbated by the expense of improving the accuracy of targeting, as discussed in Jayne et al, 2018.

One in a series of guest blog posts from leading voices in global development on achieving long-term sustainability and growth while ending hunger, poverty, and malnutrition. This originally appeared on IFPRI.org.

By Fleur Wouterse

This post originally appeared on the IFPRI.org blog as the first of a series of blog posts on the release of the 2017-18 Annual Trends and Outlook Reports (ATORs) at the 2018 ReSAKKS Annual Conference in Addis Ababa Oct. 24-26. This year's ATOR theme is social protection. Read the others here , here and here .

Since the 1990s, the Tanzanian government has striven to transform the country into a semi-industrialized economy supported by productive commercial agriculture. To accomplish this goal, policymakers pursued a policy of trade liberalization and reduced government intervention, including the agricultural sector. As a result, Tanzania has experienced a moderately high agricultural sector growth rate of 4.1 percent per year over the last two decades; this rate is comparable with neighboring countries including Kenya (4 percent growth per year) and Uganda (3.2 percent).

This piece originally appeared on the IFPRI.org blog .