Social Differentiation and the Politics of Land: Sugar Cane Outgrowing in Kilombero, Tanzania

The Political Economy of Sugar in Southern Africa – Introduction

“…41 In practice, governments circumvent the problems by zoning areas as strategic to national development, and therefore subject to special planning powers and resulting in significant public investment in infrastructure -and often leveraging concessional loan funding, as with the EU's Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol (AMSP) countries support. Examples are discussed of Malawi's Green Belt Initiative 42 and Tanzania's Southern Agriculture Growth Corridor (SAGCOT) initiative, 43 both involving substantial investment in sugar. The key strategy at local level is to compensate people displaced from the land with opportunities to grow sugar cane with a guaranteed market, as in Illovo's planned allocation of 10 per cent of every 1,000 ha of irrigated sugar cane to smallholders in the Green Belt Initiative.…”

Gender, politics and sugarcane commercialisation in Tanzania

“…KSCL's expansion strategy, which includes an outgrowers' scheme, is financed by the government of Tanzania, the EU among other donor agencies, local and international financial institutions and NGOs (Sulle and Smalley 2015;Tomlinson 2005). As a result, both estate and outgrowers' outputs have increased substantially with outgrowers accounting for about 43 percent of total cane processed by the company's mills (Illovo 2014;Sulle 2017). Nonetheless, these increases in productivity must not be attributed to privatisation per se, but to a number of factors at play.…”

“…22 Overall, the average farm size in Tanzania is 1.2ha (FAO 2018). A key reason for higher than average farm sizes in these villages is the ongoing expansion of canegrowing as a result of market demand and higher prices for sugarcane compared with other crops in the area (Sulle 2017).…”

“…Since privatisation, in terms of size of farmland, inequality among outgrowers has increased (Sulle 2017). While the number of famers cultivating less than five acres has doubled from 3384 in 2003 to 6320 in 2013, the number of outgrowers cultivating between five and 50 acres has increased from eight in 2003 to 1667 in 2013 (Illovo 2014).…”

Land Deals, Labour and Everyday Politics

“…As the impacts are differentiated for social groups and classes, so does the political reactions from below [ 4 ]. There have been accounts of adaptation and co-existence in post-soviet Russia [ 5 ], resistance and struggles for incorporation in Africa [ [6][7][8], and the largely well-known overt resistances from both workers, dispossessed farmers and indigenous communities in many parts of Southern America [ 9,10 ]. Certainly, the historical, political, economic and social contexts within which land deals take place are vital to shaping the political reactions from below.…”