Agricultural Policy and Poverty Reduction in Tanzania: Policy Brief

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere the founder President of Tanzania, devoted most of his policies and efforts to rural development through the policy of Ujamaa whose objective was the emancipation of the poor from abject poverty and deprivation. He abolished feudal tenure and steered the promulgation of the Arusha Declaration in 1967 as a blue print for socialist state driven development. Its implementation started with villages settlements which were self-directing and voluntary but when the pace of voluntarism became slow force was used to move people into planned villages. The policy failed to achieve optimum results for several reasons. First as people were moved from their traditional habitats, they lost motivation to work. Secondly, the implementation shifted from participatory to coercive approaches which led to resentment. Third while the President was committed to equality and grassroots based participation, his implementers believed in top down prescriptive and bureaucratic approaches. Fourth, the policy was predicated on assumption of communalism and collectivism as inherent features of African systems of production and distribution while those practices were already surpassed by the emergence of commodity production and capitalism even before colonial invasions. Due to these and other factors, Ujamaa policy neither reduced poverty nor did it increase prosperity for the poor or the country as a whole.This book focuses on the role of rural development policy and its contribution to poverty reduction in Tanzania. It has seven chapters starting with an introduction on Ujamaa policy; chapter two on the role of education in creating capacity for innovation among smallholder farmers and chapter three on the introduction of tiller technology in selected districts and challenges that limited its adoption and diffusion. Chapter four analyses three phases of targeted input subsidies to farmers and the success and challenges of this policy in each phase. Chapter five is about the tobacco value chain in Tanzania and the future of this crop in the light of international regulations and competition. Chapter six compares the development and management of cashew value chains in Vietnam with and Tanzania. Chapter seven uses two case studies to indicate conditions that make it possible for state and civil society organizations to work together on poverty alleviation