Contract Farming in Tanzania: Implications for Smallholder Farmers’ Gender Relations, Livelihoods, and Subjectivities

Abstract

AbstractIn the attempt to transform Tanzania’s agriculture and improve smallholder farmers’ lives, the government of Tanzania adopted a private-public partnership (PPP) model, which put smallholder farmers at its center as potential entrepreneurs who can address the problem of food shortages and “lift themselves out of poverty.” The Tanzanian government has encouraged the practice of contract farming and embraced the dominant global agricultural narrative, which considers contract farming to be the best approach for both technological transfers to smallholder farmers and smallholder farmers’ market integration while also increasing incomes, productivity, and food availability. However, there has been a debate about contract farming between neoclassical and institutional economists, who focus on the economic impacts and are proponents of this mode of production, and social scientists, including geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists, who look at a wider range of social and economic consequences and tend to be far more critical. Drawing from feminist political ecology (FPE), the feminist post-structuralist approach (PSF), and Marxian political economy perspectives, and using mixed methods of data collection (interviews, participant observation, informal interviews, and survey method), I explore (a) how gender relations are affected by smallholder farmers’ (SHFs) incorporation into contract farming schemes, (b) the localized political conflicts that these schemes generated; c) the ways the local farmers’ livelihoods were affected by these new farming arrangements, and (d) the ways farmer identities and subjectivities, were affected by their incorporation into contract farming schemes at a moment when ‘entrepreneurial’ smallholder farmers were being celebrated. My findings show that participation in contract farming and the adoption of new farming techniques shaped farmers’ lives by changing their traditional rice production practices. The introduction of contract farming in Mngeta altered people’s previous livelihood activities through increased mechanization and commercialization. With the arrival of contract farming and of new commercial opportunities afforded by KPL, the dominant company engaged in rice production, more men became interested in growing rice, a crop previously considered to be exclusively a “women’s crop.” Men’s increased involvement in rice production provided a way for them to gain control over the rice harvest and over the money they generated from selling rice to outside buyers, an encroachment on what had formerly been a woman’s domain. Additionally, the training designed by NAFAKA to instill entrepreneurial skills led some farmers to adopt neoliberal subjectivities, encouraging these small farmers to understand the problems they faced- of low productivity, a lack of markets, the absence of credit, and food insecurity- as a product of personal shortcomings, such as a lack of entrepreneurial initiative or persisting traditional mindsets, rather than as rooted in relations of power and inequality. Technologies of the self, involving the desire to become a “modern farmer”, produced a lending system that tied smallholder farmers to debt relations without which they could not meet the expectations of “modern farming.” Moreover, broader relations of production and distribution between the company and its contract farmers created the conditions for dissatisfaction and mistrust, and political contentions between the two parties, leading to the collapse of the scheme and the subsequent collapse of KPL. The study analyzes the broader significance of this research and recommends areas for further research and policy interventions.