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Land of opportunity: Should Tanzania encourage more large-scale farming?

Isis Gaddis's picture

Let's think together: Every Sunday the World Bank in Tanzania in collaboration with The Citizen wants to stimulate your thinking by sharing data from recent official surveys in Tanzania and ask you a few questions.

Like most developing countries, more than 80 percent of the poor in Tanzania are to be found in rural areas. Nearly all of them are active in the agriculture sector as laborers or owners of a small piece of land that they cultivate for a living. In this context, land is a vital asset for food security and survival. In parallel, global population growth, rapid urbanization, and increases in incomes have resulted in a sharp increase in demand for agricultural products worldwide, leading to an expansion of cultivated area and leading investors to go out in search of new farmland.  The global search for farmland has intensified in sub-Saharan Africa, including Tanzania. 
 
Tanzania appears to offer good prospects for the expansion of the size of farming operations as illustrated by the following statistics:  
 
- Only about 33 per cent of arable land in this country is cultivated compared to over 95 per cent for Malawi and Rwanda. Similarly, Ghana, Uganda and Ethiopia have used more than 80 per cent of their arable land.
- There is comparably limited land pressure on Tanzanian farmers since their average plot size remained constant at around 2.5 ha between 2003 and 2008.  This is in sharp contrast with Uganda where average landholding has diminished by 40 per cent largely as the result of demographic pressures.
- Approximately 10 per cent of the farmland remains unused largely because of technological constraints and lack of human and financial capacity. For instance, in 2008 only 18.6 per cent of farms used an ox, 3.1 per cent a tractor, and 1.5 per cent a thresher.
- There are already quite a few medium to large farms in Tanzania: about 20 per cent of farm households report owning more than 5 ha of land compared to only 3 and 4 per cent in India and Uganda respectively. 
 
These facts raise a number of questions: 
 
- Should the government encourage farmers to obtain larger land holdings?
- Through which channels should big farms help smallholder farmers?  Joint infrastructure? Technology transfers? Jobs?
- Is the Tanzanian government, including local authorities, equipped to negotiate and handle the needs of larger farmers?
- Will new large farms help resolve rising unemployment in rural areas and improve food security?      
 
Note: The statistics above are derived from the Tanzania Agricultural Sample Censuses (2002/03 and 2007/08), World Development Indicators, and a 2011 World Bank Report on Farmland. All are publicly available.
 

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous on
Hi Isis, Nice statistics but seemingly presented in a misleading way. Why should one think large farms are better than small farms and why higher cultivation rate, as measured by occupied arable land, is preferable? The linkages are not as straightforward as the text makes them to be. The discussion also reads inappropriate when the focus of many Africa-related discussions, esp. those regarding rising mobile phone use, is on empowering farmers in small farms, not industrial size farms. Thu

Hi: Thanks for the very good comment. This is not an advocacy for large scale farms against small ones, or that higher land cultivation is better. Rather this is about wondering whether the large tracts of unused land in Tanzania could be put to use. With 33 percent of arable land used it seems like Tanzania still has some room to use some of its remaining land. With the obsrvation that smallholder farmers have technological constraints and cannot use all the land they already have, the blog is actually asking whether there would be some space for large scale farms which could also help small ones in the process with technological transfers, infrastructure, or jobs. Cognizant of the challenges that large scale farms would bring, especially foreign ones, the blog is also wondering whether the government is equipped to properly handle them.

Submitted by Sie.Kathieravealu on
The government should encourage the farmers in their efforts to cultivate larger extents to resolve rising unemployment in rural areas and strengthen and improve the country's "food security" Cultivators must be encouraged to enlarge their farms to the extent of solving the unemployment and not to go the extent of creating "labour shortage". Allowing foreigners to indulge in large-scale farming activities Will not in any way help to resolve rising unemployment in rural areas and improve food security BUT might just create the opposite. The large-scale farms might be more mechanical intensive and large large amounts of inorganic fertilizers in the name of increasing food production. The introduction of inorganic fertilizers followed by the use of pesticides will ONLY help to DEGRADE THE EXISTING FERTILE SOIL and create environment problems that would be harmful to the country and the world. The Government must not be GREEDY in developing the agricultural sector. It has to be slow and steady in the interest of the country and HUMANITY.

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