Pictures, Bongo City, and Biofuels

A left over shot from Ndarakwai-- Bri and I doing the power walk!

A discovery at Mazumbai


A sign outside of the secondary school in Mayo (near Mazumbai). Stating exactly what I was questioning about development and Western education.


I just got back from a week in Dar es Salaam, also known as bongo city- i think because it can make you crazy. I don't recommend staying at the YWCA, but I do recommend you sneak into the fancy hotels and try to use their pools.

I was in Dar planning out my independent study and trying to make some contacts about hiphop, a member of parliament's sketchy death and the hegemony of the ruling party, CCM. On the first day there I found the university of dar and spoke to a professor who told me, CCM is cool, but you should think about studying biofuels. I thought about it-- liked it-- and went with it. I don't know if this means I am open minded or an easy pushover. But I am now completely stoked about this project.

The biofuel industry in Tanzania is both tied to environmental issues, the global food crisis, development, and land rights in Tanzania-- bringing together so many things I'm interested in on a local and international level.

So today we roll out again. Headed to Ngorongoro, Olduvai Gorge, the Serengeti and Lake Natron where we will live with a Masai family. Back on November 1.


Views from the busride to Dar. People run after the buses trying to sell things. And the Rainbow House of Moshi.

So before heading out, here's the introduction to my project proposal in case you want to learn some more. It is in super draft form because I'm just learning about biofuels myself, so feel free to comment with some thoughts/corrections...


Act Global but Think Local First: The Biofuel Industry in Tanzania
Global warming, by name and by consequence, implies a crisis that everyone on earth shares. However, the global warming issue that we see today has emerged as an environmental crisis that is inextricably tied to resource sustainability, a crisis that can be directly attributed to the countries of the West and our cultures of consumption. Therefore, even though the whole world may suffer the consequences of carbon emissions, it is the West that must change its tune, by consuming less, or find alternative sources of energy. In spite of efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues and to reduce energy consumption, at this point the West shows little sign of cutting back. For example, the United States, which consumes 26% of the world’s energy, did not even ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which would bind the country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (Green, 10 Facts). Instead America’s leaders like the presidential hopefuls, Barack Obama and John McCain, focus on alternative sources of energy such as hydro, solar power and bio-fuel.

Bio-fuel has emerged as a source of energy that Western nations can produce both at home and abroad. Although the actual carbon emissions of bio-fuel differ by crop, and as an energy source it may not be less environmentally destructive than fossil fuel burning, bio-fuel’s allure is that it is a renewable source of energy (Zarembo, Biofuel Crops). As a result, the United States and the European Union, among others, have placed targets on bio-fuel usage and are investing heavily in its production. The biggest producer of bio-fuel right now is Brazil where the government has been pushing sugarcane. America, another large producer of bio-fuel, has begun to use some of its corn produce for ethanol. However, although this has offered the United States a small amount of fuel independence, the transition to bio-fuel production has had severe consequences elsewhere, particularly in the world food market.

Currently the world is facing a food crisis that stems directly from the energy crisis. In the last few years, food prices have been rising exponentially, and international aid organizations can no longer provide food aid. Food prices are rising in relation to the rising fuel prices because the cost of transport is greater. They are also rising because food that used to be for eating is now being used as bio-fuel. The United States offers a prime example. American farmers grow excess corn every year, and the government used to buy the excess and give it away as in-kind donations to aid organizations. Now the excess is being used as bio-fuel and organizations like the UN, USAID or Oxfam must buy food on the world market. But prices are higher because of transport costs, and because places that used to grow food are now growing bio-fuel crops. Rising prices are felt everywhere, from these aid organizations to the individual buyer anywhere around the world. Estimates of this relationship fall somewhere between 3% and 75% price increases—depending on whether you are talking to the US government or the World Bank (Chakraboortty, Secret Report).

If the world is facing such a food crisis, then why is there such a push to continue growing biofuel? The answer to this question lies with the agenda of the United States and other Western countries. Biofuel offers a potential solution to the fuel crisis that is an important item on the American agenda. While the global food crisis is literally starving people who are dependent on food aid, most Americans are eating food, albeit at higher prices. The connection between food price and biofuel is complex enough that your average American does not realize what biofuel is doing to their budget. What the average American does know, thanks to the country’s leadership and media, is that American dependence on oil means dependence on people who don’t particularly love America. This logic, people follow. And so reducing dependence on Middle-Eastern oil has become a bigger priority than reducing the escalating food crisis. The US has gone about this by converting its own excess food to ethanol, and by encouraging investment in biofuel growth in countries like Tanzania. But intentions are not all selfish, and much of the push for biofuel comes from consideration for the environment.

Biofuel production in Tanzania is a quickly emerging industry, presented both as this world environmental solution, and as an opportunity for development through foreign direct investment. In the context of structural adjustment plans, foreign direct investment is considered one of the keys to Tanzania’s “development” because multinational corporations will bring capital to Tanzania and eventually that capital will trickle down to Tanzanians themselves. And, all biofuel companies in Tanzania would need is land and labor, two things that on the surface appear to be cheap and abundant here. However, the seeming abundance of land in Tanzania is tied to a long and complicated history of land tenure in Africa and specifically Tanzania.

Prior to the colonial period, land ownership and access to land in Tanzania may have differed over space and time, but it was almost always linked to membership in a group (Mamdani, C&S). However, with the vast political changes of the colonial period, rights in land shifted greatly, moving Tanzania and much of Africa towards more commercialized ideas of land ownership. These changes occurred in different ways across Sub-Saharan Africa, depending on the colonial mode of economic extraction. In Tanzania, where the Germans and later the British extracted wealth through cash-crop export, land holding remained largely in the hands of customary law, so long as Tanzanian labor was producing the desired crops. In an article entitled “Debating the Land question in Africa” Sara Berry highlights this point, writing,

To profit from their colonial domains, it was not enough for Europeans to claim exclusive ownership of land and natural resources: they also needed to mobilize African labor to work them. If they secured control of output by excluding Africans from land, Europeans risked alienating the labor that they needed to make the land productive. In short, European settlers and colonial regimes had a vested interest both in bringing African land and labor together, and in keeping them apart.
(Berry, DLQ, 642).

The land and labor question is also important to the biofuel industry, which in many ways looks like neo-colonialism and a new form of cash-crop extraction. But before biofuel arrived in Tanzania, land holding here shifted greatly during the period of Ujamaa that followed independence.

Under the leadership of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania attempted to implement African socialism known as Ujamaa. During this period Nyerere planned and executed the biggest forced relocation in all of sub-Saharan Africa, moving a country of dispersed populations into villages. The idea of villagization was to ease the delivery of social services while promoting Tanzanian community. Ujamaa was both an economic system and a mindset that remains pervasive in Tanzania. Proverbs such as “bega kwa bega tutafika” or in English, “shoulder to shoulder we will arrive” highlight this mindset. It is important to keep in mind the spirit of cooperation when thinking about the biofuel industry, but that will come later. Ujamaa drastically changed land-ownership in Tanzania. For one the government became the sole owner with a monopoly of all land in Tanzania, which was divided between general, village and reserved land. Secondly, Tanzanians who had formerly practiced shifting cultivation over large tracts of land were suddenly forced to live in much closer proximity. Agricultural inputs like fertilizer made this possible in the short term, but it is unclear how these practices are playing out today.

In the 1980s under the IMF and World Bank’s Structural Adjustment plan, Ujamaa ended and over time some Tanzanians have begun to spread out and move back to their former land holdings. It is impossible to characterize this movement throughout Tanzania, because land holding differs drastically geographically, with much more nutrient-rich and sought after land in the Mountains of the North than the Miombo woodlands of the South. Given the soil quality elsewhere, rain patterns that wash out soil nutrition, and current lack of fertilizers, it is likely that many Tanzanian farmers would produce higher yields by practicing shifting cultivation— and this increases the debate over land holdings and access. It is in this context that biofuel companies are arriving in Tanzania and looking for land to cultivate crops like Jatropha. What they find are unclear property rights, and areas that for whatever reason, be it ujamaa or shifting cultivation, look unused. The national government owns all land in Tanzania but access is controlled on the village level, and so it is with the villages that biofuel companies are negotiating.

The national government has stood back and allowed negotiations between multi-nationals and villages to go on without any sort of policy framework. As a result, decisions concerning land ownership are happening fast, and without a huge amount of consideration for future needs, particularly as the population in Tanzania is growing. Without knowledge of the ecological effects of a jatropha monoculture, or the changing land uses that are following the end of Ujamaa, it is difficult to predict how Tanzanians will need access to land in the coming years. It is also difficult to monitor the process of land negotiation, which likely leaves out the voices of women and caters to people in the village who have the most power, perhaps the biggest landowners.

Thus the emergence of the biofuel industry in Tanzania holds mixed possibilities. There is a sense that the investment of foreign capital in Tanzania is positive because of the trickle down effect, and because the investment in agriculture will create jobs. However it is worth noting that the jobs available to Tanzanians are likely to be minimum wage or less and only for intensive field labor. Another potential benefit of the biofuel industry in Tanzania is the possibility that it will bring Tanzania to the negotiation table over world energy sources. This could be a very powerful position to be in as the world’s oil sources continue to be depleted. Biofuel also offers an energy source to Tanzanians themselves, who currently get most energy from hydro or solar power. According to the IMF/WB and multinationals perspectives, biofuels will improve the efficiency of land use in Tanzania, utilizing “unused” land. But in spite of the benefits, the biofuel industry looks eerily familiar to the cash crop economy of the colonial period.

There are many risks involved in growing biofuels. For one, it decreases food security because people are no longer growing food but instead growing crops—many factors encourage this shift, particularly cash wages. At a time when population growth is increasing and global food prices are increasing, this move is very risky. Secondly, Tanzania will be dependent on outside demand for biofuel, even if the country is consuming some biofuel itself. In a country that was once encouraged to grow cash crops such as sisal, something that is no longer popular on the world market but is difficult to clear from the fields, Tanzania should be wary of its dependence on outside demand for biofuel. If external demand decreases, Tanzania will be stuck with its jatropha monoculture—the ecological consequences of that possibility remain unclear.

Questions surrounding biofuel persist, but unfettered by the government, the industry is growing rapidly in Tanzania and transitioning out of its infancy. Given the lack of policy framework in regard to land ownership, and the lack of clarity surrounding the ecological impact of biofuels, this quick growth is clearly not in the best interests of Tanzanians. Growing biofuel is not an important item on the agenda for Tanzania. Tanzania consumes very little energy, much of which is already attainable from within the country, and 60% of which is used in the areas surrounding Dar es Salaam—probably by ex-patriots (Emmanuel, personal communication 10/16/08). However, even though it is not a part of Tanzania’s agenda, the government’s absence of policy welcomes multinationals. To a certain extent, under its structural adjustment program, the Tanzanian government may have little choice about the matter, catering to American and European institutions rather than the interests of its people.

And so the remaining question is how will Tanzania, its public, private and voluntary sector, manage the transition of biofuel out of the infant stage and into a developed industry? It is a complex web of opinions and perspectives that must be reconciled. My prediction is that Tanzania will not slow down and that this is just another form of neo-colonialism. The best outcome for Tanzania will be the continuing demand for biofuel from places like the United States, and hopefully the discovery that biofuel is not ecologically destructive. If this does happen then perhaps Tanzania will some day be sitting at the table of a new OPEC, and deciding its own future with the power of its energy holdings.