Green economy & degradation narratives cause land conflict in Tanzania

The Tanzanian Government, investors and aid donors have presented the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) as a model for the “green economy” in Africa, combining investments in large-scale farming with environmental conservation. In the Kilombero Valley, some small-scale farmers have been dispossessed through the expansion of capital investments in large-scale capital-intensive farming; others are contracted as outgrowers. However, the long-held perception that pastoralists cause widespread environmental degradation plays a key role in the implementation of SAGCOT.

In 2012, Operation Save Kilombero consisted of violent evictions of pastoralists from the valley in order to conserve the wetland ecosystem, which the Government and donors saw as threatened by overstocking. There followed a series of evictions, each one leading to a spillover of pastoralists to other areas, creating new conflicts with crop farmers and conservationists. While land-use conflicts in Africa are commonly thought to be caused by natural resource scarcity resulting from population growth, the paper “Green economy, degradation narratives, and land-use conflicts in Tanzania” (2019) by Mikael Bergius et al, published in World Development 129 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104850) shows how degradation narratives can be a key driver of conflicts, in this case to legitimise and pave the way for large-scale agricultural investments and environmental conservation under the cloak of a “green economy”.

Posted on 11 March 2020 in Pastoralism & Natural Resources, Pastoralism & Peacebuilding