Agrarian Crisis and Economic Liberalisation in Tanzania

Abstract

It is now generally acknowledged that Tanzania's policy of rural collectivisation has been abandoned as a failure. By most accounts, systematic efforts to bring about collective production ceased altogether during 1975 and may have halted, informally, as early as the end of 1974. According to the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act of 1975, one or another form of block farming is considered sufficient for a village to become officially identified as an ujamaa village. Thus, ujamaa as a concept once intended to convey a social ideal of collective ownership, labour, and sharing is reduced to describing a state of affairs in which individual farming is intermittently supplemented by occasional cooperation in such tasks as planting and harvesting. Villagisation without socialism is, in effect, the current policy.

The changing face of agriculture in Tanzania: Indicators of transformation

“…The agri-food system was at that time characterized by statecontrolled input and output markets and pan-territorial crop prices that brought low prices for farmers. In 1973, the ujamaa villagization programme gathered peasants into nucleated settlements, often to practice collective farming (Bryceson, 1988;Lofchie, 1978), and this programme (unpopular among farmers) is regarded as an internal cause of agricultural decline in the early 1970s (Lofchie, 1978). High oil prices in the 1970s also contributed to this agricultural malaise by raising transportation costs and making it more difficult to produce crops for export, prompting a shift toward domestically consumed crops and growing the country's trade deficit (Bryceson, 1988(Bryceson, , 2019.…”

Village land politics and the legacy of ujamaa

“…Back in 1981, a compiled bibliography about ujamaa villages vaunted 469 titles (McHenry 1981). Until the late 1980s, the debate maintained ideological undertones: ujamaa and villagisation were turned into a gym to flex ideological muscles in a pro vs. contra debate on Third World socialisms and theories of collective action (Lofchie 1978;Putterman 1986). Without delving too deeply in the historiography of the Tanzanian villagisation, scholars documented the political and social aspects of failing agricultural collectivisation (Von Freyhold 1979;Abrahams 1985); the consequences on the wider economy (Briggs 1979;Weaver and Kronemer 1981); the authoritarian, top-down practices and the use of force which turned villagisation into a synonymous for forced resettlement into nucleated villages (Boesen et al 1977;Kjekshus 1977;Moore 1979), bound to be remembered, alternatively, as a state-led disruption of local environmental and ecological practices (Kikula 1997;Lawi 2007); a stateled "high modernist" plan to capture the peasantry (Hyden 1980;Scott 1998); or a complex and contradictory scheme of social engineering (Schneider 2003;2004).…”

Food subsidies in developing countries: costs, benefits, and policy options

“…Further evidence of this phenomenon conies from Tanzania. Lofchie (1978) argues that "due to the severe shortage of foreign exchange and the urgent need to use remaining currency reserves to finance immediate food requirements, the Government was compelled to impose stringent limitations on other imports. Since Tanzania had long since all but eliminated the acquisition of luxury items and other non-essentials, the new restrictions affected the importation of economically vital items such as raw materials for industry, new capital goods and spare parts.…”