Sizing up the developmental state and the future of Tanzania's peasantry

The Agrarian Question in Tanzania – A State of the Art Paper

Sam Maghimbi, Razack B Lokina and Mathew A. Senga

Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, 2011, 90 pp., ISBN-10: 9171066845, ISBN-13: 978-9171066848, £8.00/$14.00

This short book is a welcome and informative contribution to the larger academic and political debates that have been developing again in recent years over land and agrarian questions throughout the South. It succinctly brings to bear the experience and dynamics of land and agricultural development in Tanzania over the past decades and discusses the particular problems of land tenure, use and ownership, state regimes and vested interests that have negatively affected the Tanzanian economy and peasant production. Readers should not be misled by the book's brevity, as it represents a concentrated synthesis of several scholars' work.

The book opens with a rigorous review of the literature on the agrarian question in the transition to capitalism within the framework of radical political economists. The authors agree with eminent Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji that the agrarian question has not been solved in countries like Tanzania, one of the issues that debates over land reform have sharpened up over recent years, and that it is closely linked to the national question that they also consider unsolved. (Here it would be preferable for the reader if they clearly identified authors they disagree with on this, as the term ‘internationalist left’ is not only vague even descriptively, it erroneously lumps together a wide range of different views on this issue.) The literature review reflects some of the contrasting positions on the paths to capitalist transition (from ‘above’ or ‘below’), the ‘dual’ nature of African economies – with commercial production for export to the metropoles on the one hand and impoverished local peasant (subsistence) production on the other – and the ways in which peasant accumulation has been stifled throughout the colonial and post-colonial periods, including discussion of accumulation by dispossession later in the book, as well as the changing nature of the rural classes as neoliberalism and global forces have increasingly penetrated these economies.

African and other scholars have long been grappling with Tanzania's development and its relationship to the industrialised countries; the authors graphically illustrate the subordination of Tanzania's economy to a global system, from which especially the rural population has benefited little. It continues to be agriculture-based, with some four million peasant households farming on very small plots, mostly between one and three hectares. The land tenure system is seen as the main reason for peasants' continued poverty, and their lack of accumulation and control over resources. This problem involves not only ongoing insecurity of tenure, inadequate sizes of family plots (continually subdivided among male and sometimes female offspring) and limited scales of production, but also the role of the state.

The state is discussed in the light of both the current ‘state capitalist’ regime as they call it and the post-colonial leadership of Julius Nyerere and his ‘African socialist’ experiment, which the authors refer to as ‘populist’. A section of the book is devoted to critiquing this period introduced by the 1967 Arusha Declaration (TANU, 1967) and lasting until the villagisation plan was ended in 1976, which was followed by a series of liberalising structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s. The authors argue that resettling peasant families into communal (Ujamaa) villages continued to undermine peasants' tenure and incentives to produce. When the expected economies of scale were not realised, the state exerted further control over the peasantry by collectivising and by replacing the large number of cooperatives marketing peasant crops, which were organised by what they refer to as ‘the nascent agrarian bourgeoisie’, with state-run parastatals. Both the parastatals and what the authors emphasise was a corrupt state bureaucracy directly siphoned off accumulation from agriculture.

The authors maintain that agriculture should be the basis of the economy and they show that Nyerere's programme did not succeed in mobilising the peasantry for social change in the ways intended. Yet they make the sweeping statement that socialism has failed everywhere, without seriously examining other 20th century experiences, particularly the agrarian revolution in China1 that was a central part of socialism established there before it was reversed (in the Deng Xiao-ping reform era) and which certainly influenced East Africa as well as Nyerere, despite the fact that he followed a very different path. It is surprising that they instead take refuge in the old argument of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, based on pre-modern Europe and a presumed selfish and unchangeable human nature, the conceptual limits of which even liberal-minded scholars have long discredited; in fact its logic has of late been mainly used by neoliberal proponents of the free market and in favour of displacing peasants on ecological grounds.

Apparently ignoring the extensive findings in 1994 of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters that recommended decentralising and democratising land tenure management (see also Shivji, 2009), the Land and Village Acts of 1999 reinforced state control over public land as ‘vested in the President’ and over land use. Like the colonial land tenure policy, these Acts also granted occupancy rights, including on a customary tenure basis. The authors argue that these customary rights favour men and that measures aimed at greater equality for women, such as joint titling, do not work in a situation where most peasants do not have title deeds and do not register their small pieces of land. Women's position in the peasant economy would have been a useful aspect to develop further in their analysis.

With these Acts the state accelerated access of village land to foreign capital through long leases, and subsequent land law amendments went further in this direction. The book provides interesting case studies of conflicts over mining with the arrival of large-scale mining companies after the late 1990s and between pastoralists and crop farmers competing for land. It also details major land use changes caused by government allocation of pastoralist and other land for bio-fuel production (a ‘huge wave of investors since 2005’) and for conservation, in part at least for private hunting and wildlife-based tourism.

The authors' proposed solutions for overcoming land fragmentation are to make title deeds compulsory in order to formalise and institutionalise land tenure. They favour developing a combination of middle and large-scale domestic farming on new agricultural land of about 100 acres per family in the hope of creating jobs, improving production and channelling development towards the national economy.

One can see the appeal of spreading the benefits of developing capitalism over a larger rural base than has been the case in Tanzania. At the same time, the authors' own warning about the possible results reflects a certain ambivalence that is noticeable throughout the book. They are plainly aware of this quandary that is not easily solved. Reinforcing the position of a section of ‘richer’ farmers might make it possible for them to produce on a larger scale and thus accumulate more, in contrast to the current level of very slight (or negative) peasant accumulation. At the same time, the authors do recognise the danger of this leading to the peasants being completely dispossessed and pulled further into low-waged farm labour – as ‘semi-proletarians’, in the authors' words – to produce for the needs of the global market or, I would add, becoming part of the vast section of the rural population that is chronically unemployed, as has happened in many countries throughout the South.

How to move away from extreme land fragmentation that prevents petty accumulation in Tanzania without peasants losing their land (or not regaining access to it), that elsewhere is the frequent outcome of the dynamics of liberalisation and privatisation, is a genuine dilemma. Implementing titling to protect tenure security is undoubtedly necessary but the extent to which the state can be relied on to regulate needed land consolidation and to develop a progressive ‘yeoman’ farmer class is certainly questionable. In this regard, the authors' appeal to the state to ‘nurture’ capitalist agriculture rather than to ‘pirate’ the profits and expect ‘kickbacks’, as they argue has largely been the case up till now, is perhaps more wishful than realistic, given the current framework that they rightly see as likely to bring the economy increasingly under the thumb of global corporations. They argue that the state is weak, divided and ‘petty bourgeois’, yet their own compelling examples demonstrate its overall role and close ties to foreign interests, whose development agenda appears to indicate further disarticulation of the Tanzanian economy (see also Mfugale, 2012). And naturally there is the crucial matter of what type of social transformation in conjunction with the goal of domestic accumulation they believe can really occur in this scenario.

Although analyses of this kind always raise new questions, those interested in agrarian change and the much bigger ongoing discussion in the field it is part of will find this book a necessary and very worthwhile read.

Notes

¹ For a first-hand account, see Hinton (1997 [1966]), and see also Han (2008), in which Han counters much of the misinformation and mainstream narrative about China in this period.