Posted on November, 10, 2021 at 08:59 am
Dar es Salaam. As the mainstay of the economy, it is understandable that agriculture should attract unusual interest of politicians. One area that has shown how politicised agriculture has been is the area of policy statements. Since 1961, the government created policy after policy in the agriculture sector as part of efforts to ensure food self-sufficiency and improved livelihood of farmers in rural areas. Some of these policies were highly publicised through policy statements that were meant to serve as rallying cries to mobilise the rural populations to follow the government’s directives to produce more.
At independence, Tanzania’s agriculture was mostly peasantry, except for a couple of plantations owned and managed by settlers. Even the colonial land policy reflected this characteristic in agriculture and made a distinction between the statutory land law and customary land law. The statutory land law applied to urban areas and to non-Africans while the customary land law was applicable to rural Africans, according to Prof Deborah Fahy Bryceson who did research on Tanzania’s post-independence agrarian economy. This policy was retained by the newly independent government until 1975 when the new Village Land Act was passed.
From the outset the independent government sought to change peasantry into ‘modern’ agriculture. From as early as 1958, Mwl Julius Nyerere - who went on to become the first President of the new nation - signaled the need to restructure land tenure to modernize peasantry agriculture in a paper he authored in that was entitled ‘Mali ya Taifa’ (State Property). A year after independence, in 1962, the government nationalised all land.
In an assessment of 10 years of independence that he made to a Tanganyika African National Union NEC meeting Mwl Nyerere recognised the fact that at independence the economy depended on the production of subsistence foodstuffs and primary commodities for export and that the government was set to change through agriculture modernisation. “The vast majority of the farmers of Tanganyika were, in fact, still just subsistence producers, or were selling the very minimum of their low output in order to pay taxes,” Mwl Nyerere said.
Source: The Citizen