Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by Professor James C. Scott

Author:Professor James C. Scott [Scott, Professor James C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-05-19T03:40:00+00:00

Communal Farming and Intensive Production

Collecting Tanzanians into villages was seen from the very beginning as a necessary step in establishing completely new forms of agricultural production in which the state would play the major role. The first five-year plan was explicit.

Although the improvement approach [as opposed to the transformation approach] can contribute to increasing production in ... zones [with low and irregular rainfall], it cannot in all events give rise to very sub stantial results because of the dispersal of the farm producers, the impoverishment of the soils by the practice of bush burning and considerable difficulties in marketing products. The policy which Government has decided to pursue with respect to all these zones consists in re-grouping and re-settling farmers on the most favorable soil, installing there a system of private or collective ownership and introducing supervised crop rotation and mixed farming that would permit the maintenance of soil fertility.53

The population concentrated in planned villages would, by degrees, grow cash crops (as specified by the agricultural experts) on communal fields with state-supplied machinery. Their housing, their local administration, their agricultural practices, and, most important, their workdays would be overseen by state authorities.

The forced villagization campaign itself had such a disastrous effect on agricultural production that the state was in no position to press ahead immediately with full-scale communal farming. Huge imports of food were necessary from 1973 through 1975.54 Nyerere declared that the 1.2 billion shillings spent for food imports would have bought one cow for every Tanzanian family. Roughly 60 percent of the new villages were located on semiarid land unsuitable for permanent cultivation, requiring peasants to walk long distances to reach viable plots. The chaos of the move itself and the slow process of adapting to a new ecological setting meant further disruptions of production.55

Until 1975, the state's effort to control production outside its own state schemes took the classic colonial form: laws mandating that each household grow certain crops on a minimum number of acres. A variety of fines and penalties were deployed to enforce these measures. In one region, officials announced that no one would be allowed to go to market or ride a bus unless he could prove that he was cultivating the required seven and one-half acres of land. In another case, famine relief was withheld until each villager had planted one acre of cassava in accordance with the minimum acreage law.',' One major source of the conflict leading to the dissolution of the Ruvuma ujamaa villages was the forced cultivation of fire-cured tobacco at what the villagers took to be confiscatory prices. As the colonizers had understood long before, forced cultivation of this kind could be successfully imposed only on a peasantry that was physically concentrated and therefore able to be monitored and, if necessary, disciplined.57

The next step was regulated, communal production.5" This form of cultivation was anticipated in the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act (1975), which established "village collective farms" and required village authorities to draw up annual work plans and production targets.

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