Communal Production Research Articles

Village communities, cooperation, and inequality in Tanzania: Comments on Collier et al

Findings of a study by Collier, Radwan and Wangwe (CRW) are contrasted with those of other quantitative/empirical studies, especially by the Economic Research Bureau (Dar es Salaam) and the author. The author argues that CRW overstate the economic significance of communal farming, and that they misconstrue the intentions of the ujamaa program as being basically redistributive. He suggests that futile exercises in communal production served the interests of influential, richer farmers, who had little desire to see ordinary peasants engage in effective cooperation and participatory control over their local economies.

Support or subversion: the relationship between farming systems research and Tanzania's rural development policy objectives

Although farming systems research (FSR) programs have been initiated in many countries, insufficient attention has been devoted to their relationship with national rural development policies. While clearly in many instances the two will be working in a supportive fashion towards common goals, in other instances they may be operating at cross purposes. This relationship is examined through an ex post facto consideration of the historical record of rural development policies in the East African nation of Tanzania. Since independence, Tanzania has embarked on a wide variety of rural development initiatives including the introduction of communal production systems, massive resettlement programs, price controls, and the establishment of parastatal marketing firms. These policies have been formulated to achieve specific societal goals such as greater equity, the provision of social services, and the feeding of the urban population. In contrast to these broad concerns and policies, the FSR approach focuses on understanding the problems and opportunities of individual family units and on setting in motion a process of technology generation and dissemination that will increase the productivity of these families. The general conclusion is that although FSR practitioners and national policy makers often differ markedly in their perspectives on rural development, improved communications will provide substantial benefit to both sides. The FSR teams can provide new insights that will aid in the formulation of improved policies. Similarly, national policy goals that are handed down should provide the FSR teams with another basis to judge and modify potential technological interventions. The long-term success of any FSR program is dependent upon effectively fulfilling both of these roles.

Hunting Territories, Hunting Bosses and Communal Production among Coastal James Bay Cree

Cet examen des differentes activites productives (chas se, trappe, peche) des Cris de la Baie James indique que la production de la fourrure pour le marche ne parvient pas a expliquer la presence ou 1'absence du complexe du chef de la chasse en territoire de chasse. En effet, ce complexe n'est pas, ainsi que I'ont cru quelques anthropologues anterieurs, un exemple de pro priete privee naissante ou d'usufruit privatise. Le chef de la chasse est un leader politique et un gardien de richesses, il n'est pas un proprietaire. Les carac teristiques des territoires de la chasse des Cris con cordent avec 1'aspect communal et egalitaire de leurs relations qui dominent les activites productives fon dees sur le territoire. Cette analyse corrobore 1'opi nion que le complexe territorial et ses variations sont des adaptations ancrees dans la connaissance des Cris des caracteristiques du gibier, y compris les strate gies appropriees du controle de la chasse et du gibier.

Tanzanian and african socialism: Comment on Weaver and Kronemer

In an article appearing in a special issue of this journal in 198 1, reprinted as a book -Socialist Models of Development ~ James Weaver and Alexander Kronemer discussed the failure of Tanzanian socialism, putting heavy and appropriate emphasis upon agriculture, and relying particularly on their readings of Andrew Coulson, Goran Hyden, Michael Lofchie and a few other authors. Unfortunately, at this remove from the Tanzanian experience itself, a number of facts appear to have been misconstrued. Puttin Q general disagreements with these authors aside, I think that a few specific statements demand criticism lest they assume the status of ‘stylized facts’ in further generations of requia for poor Tanzania. My comments are restricted to rural institutional issues only. Like many other observers, Weaver and Kronemer view the ujarnaa village programme as both an attempt to restore a traditional ‘communitarian’ way of life, and an effort to bring about modernization and surplus-production. It is unclear from reading the paper whether the programme failed because it was too late to resuscitate the tradition of communal production, because there never had been such a tradition, or because the government’s programme was somehow unreconcilable with peasants’ traditions and way of life. The role of collective productionversus village creation (‘villagization’) and other government efforts and policies in the problems encountered by Tanzanian agriculture is also not well sorted out. The important facts to be stated are first, that pre-colonial agricultural systems in Tanzania involved very little collective production. The social systems were ‘communitarian’ in the sense that individual rights to land use stemmed from membership in the community, that there was mutual aid in such activities as house construction and certain field operations, and that there was some community responsibility for individual welfare. These aspects of traditional community, called ‘ujima’ in the Swahili, have a great deal in common with features of traditional community in many other parts of the world, and fairly little in common with the postIndependence ujanzaa programme.* Second, distinctions must be drawn between living in modern, development or registered villages (and the process for bringing this about, called ‘villagization’), and undertaking collective agricultural production, which has been associated with Nyerere’s ujamaa concept. The villagization idea was proposed by foreign advisers and embraced by Nyerere as early as 1962. The village settlement schemes discussed by Weaver and Kronemer were in part to play the role of showcase villages for this policy thrust, in part to be models in the technical transformation of agriculture. ‘Ujamaa’, on the other hand, was the notion of up-dated communalism which, as applied to agriculture, came, in the crucial policy statement of 1967 (‘Rural Socialism’) to look a great deal like the classical socialist collective farm idea, with the possible difference that the rate of transition to collective production, and the interim mix of household and collective activities, were to be matters of the peasants’ own local discretion.3 While ‘villagization’ and ‘ujamaa’ were married in the ‘ujamaa village’ concept in 1967 and continued to be largely intertwined up to the early 197Os, what the government eventually came to promote via the (early 1970s) regional ‘operations’ and the (mid-70s) nationwide compulsory ‘villagization’ was the grouping of peasant households (which had often, previously, been in small, scattered homesteads) into villages of relatively standard size, without a necessaqj or widespread role for collective farming. This fact, attested to by the language of the Villages Act of 1975 (which distinguished ‘village’ from ‘ujamaa village’ there is still not a single village recog-

Villagisation and the 1974–6 Economic Crisis in Tanzania

Since 1967, the year of the Arusha Declaration, Tanzania's rural policy has provided a major focus for scholars interested in the problems of development in the Third World.1Jonathan Barker has noted that many writers on Tanzania's rural policy fall into one of two camps: ‘production socialists’ who make the basic assumption that communal productionper seis desirable, and concentrate much of their research activity on the various social and political constraints; and ‘production liberals’ who are generally sceptical of the effectiveness of communal production, and they would prefer to see greater emphasis placed on the ‘self-improvement motive of families and individuals’.2

The Problem of the Withering Away of the Collective Farmer's Personal Farm Plot

The steady development of the productive forces of socialist society provides the foundation for a gradual increase in the level of socialization of collective farm production, and approximation of the cooperative property of the collective farms to general public property One of the characteristic aspects of this process is the withering away of the personal farm plot of the collective farmers, which is gradually losing its significance. As indicated at the 21st Congress of the CPSU, the communal production carried out on the collective farms is coming ever tncreasingly to embrace all the branches of agriculture. As a result, the collective farmers' requirements not only for grain, but for milk, meat, butter, potatoes, vegetables, and fruits are being ever increasingly satisfied not out of their personal garden plots, where yield is low in terms of the labor expended, but out of the produce of the more economical common collective farm endeavors.