Agrarian Crisis and Economic Liberalisation in Tanzania

Abstract

It is now generally acknowledged that Tanzania's policy of rural collectivisation has been abandoned as a failure. By most accounts, systematic efforts to bring about collective production ceased altogether during 1975 and may have halted, informally, as early as the end of 1974. According to the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act of 1975, one or another form of block farming is considered sufficient for a village to become officially identified as an ujamaa village. Thus, ujamaa as a concept once intended to convey a social ideal of collective ownership, labour, and sharing is reduced to describing a state of affairs in which individual farming is intermittently supplemented by occasional cooperation in such tasks as planting and harvesting. Villagisation without socialism is, in effect, the current policy.