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Abstract
Governments, donors and investors often promote land acquisitions for forest plantations as global climate change mitigation via carbon sequestration. Investors’ forestry thereby becomes part of a global moral economy imaginary. Using examples from Tanzania we critically examine the global moral economy’s narrative foundation, which presents trees as axiomatically ‘green’, ‘idle’ land as waste and economic investments as benefiting the relevant communities. In this way the traditional supposition of the moral economy as invoked by the economic underclass to maintain the basis of their subsistence is inverted and subverted, at a potentially serious cost to the subjects of such land acquisition.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Uma Kothari for insightful comments on an earlier draft and acknowledge the important contribution to this paper made by participants at the conference ‘Green Economy in the South: Negotiating Environmental Governance, Prosperity and Development’ held at University of Dodoma, July 2014. In particular we thank our co-presenters Alex Dorgan and Flora Hajdu, as well as the audience, for very helpful comments and questions, and Tor A Benjaminsen for his suggestions, which substantially shaped the revisions to this paper. Additionally, we thank Mufindi District officials, representatives of investment companies, village leaders as well as villagers for their invaluable cooperation. Finally, we are grateful for the financial support received from Danida BSU-GEP, without which this study would not have been possible.
Notes
1. Locher and Sulle, Foreign Land Deals, 36.
2. Ibid.
3. For example, Leach and Mearns, The Lie of the Land.
4. Kangalawe et al., Entailments of Large-scale Land Investments.
5. Individual interviews were initially conducted with different government department heads, who assisted in organising FGDs comprising other relevant officials. In total three FGDs were conducted in district council departments; in the District Natural Resource Office, District Land Office, District Planning Office and District Agricultural and Livestock Development Office. In the villages respondents for six in-depth interviews were identified through purposive sampling. One village council FGD was conducted in each village and two additional FGDs in Chogo village with villagers working in the plantations.
6. A structured questionnaire was administered to a sample of randomly selected households: 102 households in Mapanda and 47 in Chogo, representing about 10% of the village households. There are some gaps in the statistics as the available 2012 census report does not provide information about village population but only about ward population. Drawing a 10% sample was therefore done based on the village registry of households and using sub-village leaders who knew the exact numbers of households in their areas. That is, the 10% were drawn from the level of the sub-village.
7. McDowell, “Moral Economies,” 189.
8. Ibid., 187.
9. The focus of this article is on forest plantations; however, conservation and REDD+ are also pertinent examples.
10. Thompson, “The Moral Economy”; and Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant.
11. Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy back in,” 332.
12. Scott, “Afterword to ‘Moral Economies’,” 397.
13. URT, Iringa Region Socio-economic Profile.
14. Ibid.
15. MDC, Mufindi District Socio-economic Profile, 2012.
16. MDC, Mufindi District Socio-economic Profile, 2011.
17. MDC, Mufindi District Socio-economic Profile, 2013.
18. GRL is a subsidiary of Green Resources AS.
19. Both run by expats.
20. Borras et al., “Towards a Better Understanding”; and Gausset and Whyte, “Climate Change and Land Grab.”
21. Evers et al., “Introduction,” 5.
22. Ibid. See also Noe, Contesting Village Land.
23. Evers et al., “Introduction,” 17.
24. Evers et al., “Introduction”; Wolford et al., “Governing Global Land Deals”; and Noe, Contesting Village Land.
25. Wolford et al., “Governing Global Land Deals,” 192.
26. Ibid; and Evers et al., “Introduction.”
27. Noe, Contesting Village Land, 4; See also Shivji, “Not yet Democracy”; and Alden Wily, “‘The Law is to Blame’.”
28. Smucker et al., “Differentiated Livelihoods,” 44.
29. URT, “The Village Land Act.”
30. Grawert, Departures from Post-colonial Authoritarianism.
31. Ibid; and Shivji, Village Governance.
32. Smucker et al., “Differentiated Livelihoods,” 42.
33. Deininger, “Challenges Posed,” 217.
34. Ibid., 218.
35. Evers et al., “Introduction,” 13.
36. Gausset and Whyte, “Climate Change and Land Grab,” 218.
37. Cotula et al., Land Grab or Development Opportunity?; Shivji, Accumulation in an African Periphery; Alden Wily, “Looking Back;” and Noe, Contesting Village Land.
38. MDC, Mufindi District Socio-economic Profile, 2010.
39. URT, The Villages and Ujamaa Villages.
40. While land ownership did not change as a result of villagisation, and families retained most of their use rights to land, villagers have difficulty getting these rights recognised, partly because of an inability to access appropriate legal institutions. Cotula, “The International Political Economy.”
41. Askew et al., “Of Land and Legitimacy,” 120.
42. Gausset and Whyte, “Climate Change and Land Grab,” 220.
43. Deininger, “Challenges Posed,” 226.
44. Li, “Centering Labor,” 286.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 287. This critique is very similar to Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’ – ‘the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’ – referring to the enclosures of the commons in England as the classic example. Marx, cited in Benjaminsen and Bryceson, “Conservation,” 336. Building on the idea of primitive accumulation, Harvey has coined the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’ to describe the situation today. Harvey, cited in Benjaminsen and Bryceson, “Conservation,” 336.
47. Li, “Centering Labor,” 283.
48. Green Resources has benefited from NORAD funding in several ways. For example, the company took over Sao Hill Sawmill in 2003, which at the time of the take-over was privatised, but had originally been financed with NORAD funding. Refseth, “Norwegian Carbon Plantations,” 51.
49. Smucker et al., “Differentiated Livelihoods,” 44.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. People engaging in timber-related business, however, commute between villages and town centres, and may therefore not have been present during the time of this study. Villages are nevertheless largely suppliers of logs, and economic activities related to saw milling are yet to substantially have an impact on the village economy.
53. The small number involved in forestry-related activities could partially be a result of a lack of timber processing centres in the villages, which are difficult to establish as there is no electricity there.
54. Locher and Sulle, Foreign Land Deals.
55. Refseth, “Norwegian Carbon Plantations,” 72–73. See also Benjaminsen et al., “Conservation.”
56. Refseth, “Norwegian Carbon Plantations,” 73–74.
57. Gausset and Whyte, “Climate Change and Land Grab.”
58. McDowell, “Moral Economies.”
59. Refseth, “Norwegian Carbon Plantations,” 53.
60. Equivalent to US$5993 and $17,980, respectively.
61. Stave, “Carbon Upsets,” 56.
62. Ibid; and Zinn et al., “Soil Organic Carbon.”
63. Farley et al., “Effects of Afforestation.”
64. Purdon, “Land Acquisitions in Tanzania.”
65. Osborne, “Carbon Forestry,” 880.
66. Borras et al., “Towards a Better Understanding,” 214.
67. Smucker et al., “Differentiated Livelihoods,” 42.
68. MDC, Mufindi District Socio-economic Profile, 2012.