Agrarian Movements in the Neoliberal Era: : The Case of MVIWATA in Tanzania

Introduction: Emerging Debates on Rural Social Movements

In the last couple of decades, there has been a renewed interest in social movements and civil society activism. The emergence of multiple and diversified sets of collective practices and networks, such as those coalescing in the World Social Forums and the altermondialiste movement, articulated common demands and platforms about the environment, human rights, indigenous populations, women’s rights and structures of governance. These new forms of the ‘political’ represented a response ‘from below’ to rampant processes of trans-nationalization of capital, global financial institutions and the free trade regime (Della Porta & Tarrow, 2005; Della Porta, Andretta, Mosca, & Reiter, 2006).

Grounded in political sociology, this body of scholarship developed a sophisticated reading of mushrooming social movements as a process of constitution of fluid and open coalitions and networks, which defined ways of conceptualizing and doing politics and carved out significant political space and attention. This scholarship devoted most of its attention to urban-based social movements and civil society activism in the Western hemisphere, and to the transnational character of the political and discursive interactions among various organizations, their potential alliances and common platforms.

Critical agrarian scholarship significantly contributed to the growing literature on social movements in the last decade or so by analyzing the global resurgence of rural movements (Moyo & Yeros, 2005) and the consolidation of transnational agrarian movements, such as La Via Campesina (LVC), perhaps the largest coalition of peasant organizations in the world (Borras, 2008; Borras, Edelman, & Kay, 2008; Desmarais, 2007). The significant newness of these analytical perspectives was to link peasants’ political agency, responses and mobilizations to processes and dynamics of agrarian change. This is especially important in a changing global political economy shaped by the corporate-driven industrialization of agriculture, land privatization and enclosures, which have profound implications on the ways rural poor understand their conditions of social existence, assess the framework of political opportunities and adjust/respond to existing economic and political challenges and pressures. Yet, scholars have also identified the hierarchies and asymmetries that often frame relations within and between the different components of transnational social movements (Baletti, Johnson, & Wolford, 2008), while others have pointed to the class contradictions that characterize some of these organizations (Bernstein, 2014).

As the disastrous socio-economic consequences of the neoliberal project of agrarian restructuring became manifest, a new wave of struggles and mobilizations unfolded under the spur of new rural social movements. As Moyo and Yeros (2005, p. 1) argued:

In the last quarter of the century profound socio-economic and political changes have been under way in the countrysides of the periphery. Under the weight of structural adjustment programmes, peasants and workers have seen their conditions of social reproduction deteriorate giving way to a desperate search for economic and political alternatives.

Yet, despite the growing interest in rural social movements, distinct lacunas and silences have been identified in the literature including: (a) a lack of attention to the internal dynamics of agrarian movements themselves; (b) a dearth of analysis of the dynamics of inter-connectivity between the various local, national and international levels of contemporary movements; and (c) a general lack of understanding of the agrarian structure in which movements are embedded (Borras et al., 2008, pp. 11–12).

Building upon this critique, the research article aims to engage with the aforementioned gaps and contribute to the scholarship on agrarian movements by exploring the emergence of the National Network of Small-scale Farmers Groups in Tanzania (Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima Tanzania, MVIWATA), a peasant organization established in 1993, which became widely known nationally in the mid-2000s as it forged alliances with other national land-rights organizations, activists and intellectuals to fight against land grabs and climate damages caused inter-alia by the proliferation of industrial agriculture. Internationally, MVIWATA is a member of LVC and claims to subscribe to LVC’s agenda of food sovereignty, redistributive land reforms and agro-ecology.

The case of MVIWATA represents an enlightening entry point in the study of the dynamics of contemporary agrarian movements, in a context where African peasant organizations (and particularly Tanzanian) are overlooked in the literature (Martiniello, 2013, p. 311). ¹ This situation persists despite the recent growth of peasant organizations and coalitions, such as the Coalition Pour la Sauvegarde Du Patrimoine Génétique Africain (COPAGEM), Réseau des Organisations Paysannes et des Producteurs Agricoles de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (ROPPA) and Coordination Nationale des Organisations Paysannes (CNOP) in West Africa, which have been fairly successful in carving up space for political action and propagate key objectives and visions around agriculture and ecology in West Africa (Goita, 2012; Martiniello, 2013).

The research for this article was guided by the following questions: (a) what are the circumstances that led to the establishment of  MVIWATA? (b) What is the social base and composition of the movement? (c) What social classes and interests are (or claim to be) represented by the organization? (d) What is the degree of dependence on donor funds, and how does the relationship with donors affect the positions taken by the organization? (e) How do we understand the contradictory role of the state through its relationship with MVIWATA? and (f) what is MVIWATA’s relationship with transnational peasant movements like LVC?

The study combined different research methodologies: fieldwork; literature review; review of documentary sources (the organization’s reports, media reports, donor reports); in-depth interviews with selected members of the Secretariat, members of the Board, affiliated consultants, and ordinary members of the organization; and participant observation (attending and participating at events organized by the organization). These practices of social enquiry acquire further significance since the repressive and authoritarian apparatuses of the state make it increasingly difficult to track down rural social struggles and the political agency of agrarian subjects (Martiniello, 2017b, p. 407). This is coupled with a tendency in neoliberal academia to promote a move towards remote methodologies and simulation of digital alternatives (Duffield, 2014, p. 75) at the expense of grounded research and fieldwork.

Such endeavour aims to question modernist narratives that assume peasants’ social and political immobility. By situating peasant agency in the wider terrain of political contestations occurring around processes of land control, access and use, and agricultural restructuring under Kilimo Kwanza (the policy framework of agricultural modernization inaugurated in Tanzania), the article sheds new light on the extent and capacity, challenges and opportunities, of peasant agency in shaping agrarian politics at local, national and international levels.

Debating Resistance in Rural Tanzania

There has been a long-term scholarly interest in capturing how peasant mobilizations participated in the contestation of colonial forms of rule and land dispossession in Africa. Grounded in political economy and politics, scholars have shown how peasants in Africa have vigorously contributed to the overthrow of colonial regimes by taking part in anti-colonial liberation movements (Cabral, 1965; Cliffe, 1972; Davidson, 1974; Fanon, 1967; Isaacman, 1990). To Frantz Fanon (1967), peasants represented the paramount revolutionary subject which, by straddling the city and the countryside, acquired the necessary knowledge to contest colonial authority, contributed to mould political alliances, and refined a new political praxis. According to Issa Shivji (1975), the alliance between peasants and workers was the backbone upon which to build class solidarity in advancing an emancipatory social project.

Furthermore, scholars highlighted the salience of peasant consciousness (Ranger, 1985) and peasant intellectuals (Feierman, 1990) in understanding rural forms of action and praxis. In the post-colonial period, an interest in popular movements underlined the importance of recognizing new forms of organization and participation which contributed to the widening of democratization of the political space within African states (Bowen, 2000; Mamdani, Mkandawire, & Dia Wamba, 1988).

Despite this historically rich, multi-disciplinary, multi-layered and politically engaged epistemic tradition, contemporary research into the forms of resistance in Africa today has receded substantially. ² This is to a certain extent the result of the intellectual hegemony exerted by neoliberal economic and political theories since the end of the twentieth century. These theories have focused on the centrality of unfettered and deregulated markets as the optimal instruments for efficiently redistributing resources among competitive producers, thus providing public opinion with a de-politicized view of development (Ferguson, 1994). Furthermore, as mentioned before, tracing rural social struggles has become increasingly difficult because these struggles are often hidden from public view by violent or repressive state apparatuses, which makes research fieldwork in rural settings increasingly perilous.

Tanzania has a long history of popular resistance to colonial domination. Paramount examples are the 1891–1894 Hehe rebellion, the 1905–1907 Maji Maji rebellion against German colonial rule and the Meru movements against the evictions during the British colonial era (Kimambo & Temu, 1969). Far from being a politically immobile or static social space, the contemporary Tanzanian countryside is crossed by a multiplicity of social struggles and a localized, yet diversified, set of responses from below to neoliberal restructuring orchestrated by capital and the state. This ranges from conflicts around land between villagers and state agencies, cultivation rights between agribusiness companies and smallholders, and struggles for access to water and commons which involve peasant and pastoralist populations. In 2005, the Ngorogoro-Masai rural protest exploded against protracted displacement and evictions of pastoral populations perpetuated by the state since the 1990s (Shivji & Kapinga, 1998). In the delta areas, where land is currently being captured by mushrooming agribusiness operations for biofuels, conflicts over land between companies and smallholders have become ordinary (Mwami & Kamata, 2011). In the Arumeru district around Arusha, where climate and soils are excellent for agricultural production, clashes between villagers demanding land rights and the state escalated in 2010, resulting in the destruction of properties, state repression and the eviction of villagers from 10,000 ha (Massay, 2016). In the costal and southern regions of the country, mega-infrastructural investments, such as the Southern Agricultural Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), which are currently being developed to facilitate the further escalation of large-scale land enclosures driven by the appetites of agri-food corporate capital (Martiniello, 2017a) or the profit expectations of the green economy (Bergius et al., 2017), generated rising land conflicts between villagers and investors (Greco, 2016). Protests have also been rampant in mining areas around poor employment and wage conditions, deteriorating health conditions and environmental considerations. Also national parks and conservation areas, which today represent 30 per cent of national land, have been expanding, pushed by the financial benefits that conservation organizations and the tourism industry extract, often at the expenses of village land and communities (Benjaminsen & Bryceson, 2012).

Even though these struggles are often fragmented, contradictory and defensive, they alert us to the unstructured nature of protest and to the fact that what makes a movement remains a highly contested question (Malseed, 2008). They also point to the limitations of organized and structured movements to intercept the multiple foci of social struggles in the countryside (Martiniello, 2013), where concrete every-day peasant politics occur (Kerkvliet, 2009) and ‘weapons of the weak’ are utilized (Scott, 1985). The study of the MVIWATA peasant movement, therefore, does not exhaust the space of social contestation in the countryside; rather, it represents one instance, not necessary the majoritarian or principal, in the constellation of everyday social confrontations.

The Making of the Movement

MVIWATA was established in 1993, by 22 poor and middle peasants following their participation at a workshop at Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), in Morogoro region. In the next two decades, their numbers would multiply to about 400,000 members, most of them being poor peasants, with a very tiny minority from the middle sector of the peasantry. The poor peasant category includes landless peasants as well as smallholders who produce on a small piece of land (roughly 0 to 5 acres) that they own or rent. Their production is not mechanized and is seldom based upon industrial inputs. Family labour is the sole source of labour power and, in most cases, the poor peasant has to cut consumption and double as a casual labourer to cover living expenses (Greco, 2015, pp. 230–231). In this article, the terms poor peasants and smallholder peasants will be used interchangeably.

The middle peasantry works on a relatively bigger piece of land (5–40 acres), hires labour on top of family labour and has access, often through renting, to mechanized tools, such as tractors or draught animals and industrial inputs. The third category is that of rich peasants; the size of the land used by the rich peasant for production ranges from 40 to 100 acres. S/he hires labour and produces for the market. The mechanization and application of industrial inputs is intensive. Rich peasants also invest in other profitable activities like transport or renting out of tractors (Smalley, Sulle, & Malale, 2014, pp. 19–21, 25–26). In peripheral settings like Tanzania, the super-exploitation exercised on the peasantry by monopoly capital, mostly through extra-economic means, reduces the possibility of the middle and rich peasantry to climb up the capitalist ladder. With land dispossession increasing in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the trend has been downward for the middle and rich peasantry (Bernstein, 2010; Shivji, 2017).

The agenda and activities of MVIWATA have revolved around land redistribution in favour of poor peasants, fair markets, agricultural subsidies and infrastructures, while its structure consists of peasants groups at the base and a national-level organization acting like a federation. According to our findings, it seems that MVIWATA has borrowed this structure from the cooperative model of organization of agricultural production. The history of cooperative organization in Tanzania goes back to the colonial era, when cooperatives began as ‘movements from below’ by rural farmers to defend their interests within the colonial economy. While reinforcing the colonial export-oriented economy, they posed a significant challenge to the Asian monopoly in the raw-materials trade. Cooperatives were also political avenues through which peasants challenged the colonial machinery, especially the native authorities. The initial response of the colonial government was to suppress the growth of the cooperative movement, but later decided to support it under strict control, in the service of colonial objectives (Coulson, 2013, p. 92). The 1932 Cooperative Ordinance depoliticized and reorganized the cooperatives, to become ‘the economic equivalent of indirect rule’s Native Authorities’ (Feierman, 1990, p.233). Despite colonial vigilance, cooperatives played a significant role in the struggles for independence, especially in mobilizing rural farmers and linking them to the Tanganyika African National Union [TANU] leadership (Eckert, 2007; Mruma, 2014). ³

On the morrow of independence, the nationalist government promoted the cooperative movement as a model of collective production. Initially, most of the cooperatives dealt with marketing and credit provision, but the advent of independence and later socialism saw the increasing of production cooperatives in agriculture, fisheries and small-scale manufacturing. Marketing cooperatives were banned in 1976, in a move that saw all hitherto-independent avenues of popular mobilization either abolished or incorporated into the state-party machinery. The idea of having Ujamaa villages function as cooperatives did not work well, partly because of the top-down implementation of socialist policies. ⁴ When cooperatives were re-introduced in 1982, the neoliberal reformers and economic saboteurs had already gained an upper hand, while the economy was in a deep crisis (Kiondo, 1989).

This period from 1980 to 1990 was characterized by the transition from state-centred socialism to corporate-centred neoliberal capitalism. The state had already withdrawn from the provision of social services, whereas cooperatives were swindled and privatized. In 1991, the leadership code of the Arusha Declaration—that prevented leaders from engaging in capitalist activities—was officially buried. The land sector became one of the earlier targets for dispossession by the bourgeoning well-off individuals, foreign capital and the state. The increasing conflicts over land led to the formation, in 1991, of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters. Chaired by Professor Issa Shivji, a Marxist scholar from the University of Dar es Salaam, the Land Commission recommended a democratized form of land tenure that would protect and guarantee the land rights of smallholder rural producers. The Commission’s radical recommendations were largely ignored by the state, as it opted for a more neoliberal land policy and legislation (Shivji, 1998).

Poor peasants felt that they had been left alone in the market place, where they increasingly became politically marginalized and economically vulnerable. This necessitated the formation of peasant-led organizations to defend their interests, and MVIWATA was one of those organizations (Stephen Ruvuga, personal communication, 25 April 2015; Marcelina Charles Kibena, personal communication, 21 December 2015). In 1994, 1 year after the formation of MVIWATA, another organization, The Land Rights Research and Resource Institute (also known as HakiArdhi) was established, as a follow up on the Land Commission’s recommendations. ⁵

Class Composition: Visions and Antagonisms

As argued by Borras, Edelman and Kay (2008, p. 25), ‘a class analytic lens is…useful for examining the nature and orientation of various movements’, therefore capturing issues of class and other bases of social differentiation (Bernstein & Byres, 2008). This is fundamental to understand which sector of the peasantry (rich, middle or poor) controls the organization and determines its agenda. In its early years, MVIWATA seemed to be strict on membership—only small-scale farmers would be admitted as members and only their interests would be defended by the organization, because they were the main victims of the shift from socialism to neoliberalism.

Members of MVIWATA have been consistently aware of the contradictions that existed between small- and large-scale farmers. Therefore, they have been trying to prevent that their organization from being hijacked or downplayed by large-scale farmers. Six years since the starting of MVIWATA, Miraji Ibrahim Kihwele, one of the founding members, continued to emphasize its salience: ‘[l]arge scale farmers have their organization, Tanganyika Farmers’ Association and maybe they do not want to recognize MVIWATA, whose members form the majority of Tanzania’s population; thus we have to show through actions our objective of liberating ourselves’ (Kihwele, 1999, p. 6).

Ordinary farmers, with a handful of staff, ran the organization, largely on a volunteer basis with minimal donor support (Marcelina Charles Kibena, personal communication, 21 December 2015). The academics from SUA and Moshi Co-operative College, who worked with smallholder peasants, were mainly progressive. For example, in his closing remarks at the third workshop of MVIWATA, held in Morogoro, in April 1995, Professor Ramadhan N. Meghji from the Moshi Co-operative College defined the post-socialist era as one characterized by ‘competition, deception, fraud, and other numerous methods which have been used to exploit, eliminate and humiliate smallholder peasants’, and called on smallholder peasants to unite and defend themselves through their popular organization, MVIWATA (Lassalle & Gilla, 1995, p. 50).

In general, during its earlier years, MVIWATA located the problem in the new politico-economic system adopted by the country, which exposed farmers to ruthless exploitation and political marginalization and proposed as a solution a reinvigorated role for peasant-organized initiatives. Successful initiatives at the time included the formation of strong grassroots networks, winning favourable prices from buyers and taking part in policy dialogues and decisions at village and higher levels, and knowledge exchange visits between different local networks (Kihwele, 1999, p. 6; Kilegu, 1997, p. 9; Lassalle & Gilla, 1995; Nombo, 1997, p. 8).

A decade after its founding, MVIWATA took the NGO path. It became heavily dependent on donor funding, which came with conditions on the agenda and the running of the organization. There exist, in fact, significant conceptual, political and organizational idiosyncrasies between NGOs and social movements. The former prioritized projects, not movements, merely focusing on technical and financial assistances, rather than on the structural conditions that shape everyday life, or on popular mobilization and struggle to control the basic means of production (Petras, 1999, p. 434). Critics further point to the ambiguous role of NGOs in co-opting peasant leaders and intellectuals among their ranks, while simultaneously demobilizing and fragmenting class solidarities.

The ordinary members were sidelined, as MVIWATA recruited educated members of the petty bourgeoisie to execute its ‘projects’. Therefore, an incipient conflict emerged between peasant members and the salaried staff. Peasants with a radical political consciousness accused the educated staff of using their organization to enrich themselves and of being short-sited in their performance, as they operate in terms of projects and are answerable to donors. ‘Most of them [salaried staff] are carrier driven’, said one founding members in an interview, ‘and would abandon the organization for greener pastures elsewhere’. A peasant member who has been recruited to the secretariat affirmed that the educated elites do not represent the wider interests of the organization; they focus on their particular projects (Abdallah Idd, personal communication, 9 October 2015).

As MVIWATA steered into the deep waters of NGO-ization, it became bifurcated between, on the one hand, the Policy and Advocacy Unit, representing what we call the activist wing of MVIWATA, and, on the other, the Economic and Empowerment Unit which was more project-oriented in character. The ‘activist’ MVIWATA, which became the guardian of the founding principles, was led by Thomas Laiser, an erstwhile smallholder peasant from Arusha, who was self-taught until he graduated from the Open University of Tanzania and was recruited as a salaried member of staff. ⁶ The staff from this unit constantly identified MVIWATA alongside other progressive peasant organizations and built alliances with radical leftist scholars from the University of Dar es Salaam, such as Issa Shivji, Ng’wanza Kamata and Bashiru Ally. The unit covertly and openly catalysed grassroots struggles against the green revolution and its resultant land grabs (MVIWATA, 2011b, p. 9; 2012, pp. 8–12). The forums organized by the unit castigated donors and their neoliberal agenda and called for socialist transformation of the country (MVIWATA, 2011a, p. 19).

The Economic and Empowerment Unit, which is instead staffed by mainly agribusiness graduates from the SUA has been adopting a project-oriented approach, worshipping the virtues of technologically advanced and donor-funded initiatives. This unit espoused the outlook of multinational agribusiness and donor agencies of transforming the presumably traditional smallholder peasant into a modernized capitalist farmer. Two types of training, on ‘improved agronomic skills’ and on ‘entrepreneurship and business skills development’, were said to be enough to achieve this task (MVIWATA, 2012, p. 20). The model of success became the modernized farmer, who, following the unilinear vision of modernization theories, needs to be trained under a donor-funded project and religiously follow the training manuals to increase productivity and income. Reports from this unit were full of praise for modernized farmers, who not only bought lorries and expanded acreage in a blink of the eye but also became good consumers in the market place (MVIWATA, 2012, p. 34). While the peasant of the Policy and Advocacy Unit fought for better and free public education, the petty capitalist farmer of the Economic Empowerment Unit celebrated a commodified private education system. ‘I also plan to take my children to a good private school’, said a modernized farmer from Makwale village, after climbing up the ladder of prosperity (MVIWATA, 2013b, p. 29). While the reports of the Policy and Advocacy Unit are stories of loss on the part of smallholder peasants—loss of land due to dispossession by large-scale investors and loss of income due to price fluctuations, middlemen and taxation—and advocate a total overhaul of the country’s economic system, those of the Economic Empowerment Unit are only stories of success—successful training, increased productivity, skyrocketing incomes and eventual prosperity—and promote only individual avenues for social transformation.

The struggles between these two opposing units did not end in the internal meetings. They could also be observed in the public forums organized by MVIWATA. During a workshop on family farming and agro-ecology, held at SUA on 16 October 2014, the members of MVIWATA who allied with the Policy and Advocacy Unit expressed serious concerns about the contradictory positions of MVIWATA on the same issues. They pointed out, for example, that in the fields they were trained to become modernized capitalist farmers and emulate the market behaviour and entrepreneurial attitudes of large-scale farmers, while in rhetoric MVIWATA is an organization of small-scale farmers that is supposed to emphasize agro-ecological innovations and interventions.

The disclosure of internal social contradictions of MVIWATA both in terms of discourse and practice was made evident in 2015, when Stephen Ruvuga, the Executive Director, who had always maintained a moderate position, trying to bring the two sides together, made it clear that it was time that MVIWATA walked its talk. This marked the beginning of the process of MVIWATA to re-live its founding philosophy. In 2015, MVIWATA issued a radical manifesto stating the demands of smallholder farmers towards the 2015 elections. Anchored in the language of class struggle, the Peasant Manifesto called for widespread redistribution (nationalization and socialization) of the major means of production; the re-instatement of the leadership code of the Arusha Declaration; the creation of a self-sustaining economy; the de-commodification of social services; and the creation of a grassroots-based participatory democratic system (MVIWATA, 2015, 2016d, pp. 13–16; Nyamsenda, 2015).

Alongside issuing a radical manifesto, the 2015 General Assembly of MVIWATA amended the constitution of the organization so as to remove any ambiguities on membership. Terms such as ‘wakulima’ (peasants/farmers) were amended to read ‘wakulima wadogo’ (smallholder peasants/farmers), and as such membership became strictly limited to smallholder peasants, whose livelihood depended prevalently, on agricultural production for sale and consumption purposes. This was meant to shield the organization from being co-opted and hijacked by capitalist farmers (MVIWATA, 2016c, p. 12). The most crucial changes have taken place in 2016 with the adoption of the new Strategic Plan (2017–2021) by the General Assembly. Among other things, the new Strategic Plan makes a critical evaluation of MVIWATA’s past and acknowledges that MVIWATA embraced virtually every project from donors, at the expense of its founding mission. The major change brought about by the new Strategic Plan is the shift of MVIWATA from a project-oriented organization into mainly an activist organization, with its major focus on enhancing smallholder farmers’ ownership and control of the means and process of production. The main strategy would be conducting research, whose findings would then inform the mobilization of smallholder farmers so as to effect policy changes in their favour (MVIWATA, 2016a; Lina Andrew, personal communication, 16 December 2016). The new organizational structure, which is yet to be implemented, has eliminated the Economic Empowerment Unit. This is how the struggle between the two units has been settled. How far MVIWATA will be able to live up to these changes will depend on the implementation of the new Strategic Plan.

Organizational Structures: The Grassroots and the National

This section explores the relationship between local and middle/national organizational structures in MVIWATA. The aim is to avoid making generalizations based on observations at the national level—a mistake that is often committed by many scholars of social movements—and to explore the dynamics of interconnectivity (or lack of them) between grassroots and other levels. Unlike many organizations which are either entrenched at local levels without national coordination, or which are found at national level without local roots, MVIWATA is organized both locally and nationally. There are three levels of organization: national-level, middle-level (regions and districts) and local-level networks, which bring together the smallholder farmers’ groups at their respective villages and wards. The smallholder farmers’ group is, theoretically, the basic unit of organization.

An examination of the middle-level networks reveals discrepancy: some are active and others defunct. Active regions include Kilimanjaro, Arusha, Manyara, Morogoro, Ruvuma, Shinyanga and Zanzibar. Other middle-level networks, such as in Mwanza, Mara, Tabora, Kigoma and Lindi, are not very active; they only resurrect when it comes to sending delegates to the Annual General Assembly (AGM). The discrepancy in terms of activeness is explained by the presence/absence of donor funding. In an attempt to devolve the organization, the national level has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with middle levels, giving them more autonomy to raise finances from donors and get registered in their specific regional government as NGOs. But the national level still retains the mandate to sanction projects lest they divert from the organization’s mission. The MoU was later incorporated into the MVIWATA constitution (Stephen Ruvuga, personal communication, 25 April 2015; MVIWATA, 2016c, p. 12).

With donor funding and hired staff, most of the middle-level networks are but a replica of the national level. This general picture changes when we examine the structures of organization at local levels, which have neither donor funding nor hired staff: they are fully controlled by the peasant members themselves. To get the real picture of the internal organization, we need to look into the relationship between local networks (including the individual farmers’ groups) and the national and middle levels, which have hired staff and donor funding. Our examination of this relationship reveals two distinct tendencies at grassroots level, one autonomous and another dependent. To the former belonged groups and local networks located at Mkuyuni (MVIWAM), Mwaya (MVIWAMWA) and Chita (Sauti ya Wananchi Chita, SAWACHI) wards. Most of these were established prior to 2008, and as such they still embody the founding sprit of MVIWATA (Marcelina Charles Kibena, personal communication, 21 December 2015; Anneth Muyombana, personal communication, 16 December 2016). They regard themselves as primary producers for the country, and as such are the backbone of the economy and carriers of knowledge and intellect about land, agricultural production and ecology. In one of its regular and proactive reports, MVIWAMWA emphasized: ‘even if many of the smallholder peasants did not receive formal training in the classroom on the agricultural sector, they have considerable knowledge about farming’. They explain their state of poverty as the result of systemic forces and powerful social classes that exploit them. Such forces can be overcome through unity and solidarity among exploited classes. For example, to curb surplus appropriation by middlemen, the local network at Mwaya ward resolved to start a ‘crop bank’ (benki ya mazao), a common granary where all the network members would store their grains to sell them together on one day. The aim was to have one voice against the lower prices and unfair weighing mechanisms used by traders against small-scale farmers. They resolved that they could get in touch with other local networks which could be interested in buying their produce rather than selling to middlemen (MVIWAMWA, 2009, p. 13).

There are tensions between the autonomous local networks and the middle and national levels. The autonomous local levels demand that middle-level networks and national-level leaders be accountable to them. For example, in its quarterly report, the local network at Mwaya ward (MVIWAMWA) made a thorough listing of members’ profile (names, gender, the size of land owned by each member and even the type of crops each produces), current activities, challenges as well as future plans. The report ended up with a plea to the national- and middle-level executives to forge links with the grassroots, the aim being to ‘know one another and exchange ideas on the working of the organization’ (MVIWAMWA, 2014, p. 4). The local level at Mkuyuni ward also raised the issue of absence of accountability from national and middle levels in several of its meetings (MVIWAM, 2012a), and went as far as summoning the national-level leadership to its next meeting. After attending the meeting, Habibu Simbamkuti, who had just been elected National Chairman, acknowledged that ‘the local network at Mkuyuni ward [had] awakened him; and that he ought to visit all the local networks in the country’ (MVIWAM, 2012b, p. 6).

When it comes to running their activities, money is the last resort, and should it be needed, they raise it from their own activities rather than looking for donors. Usually, they think and operate in terms of use-values. When they hold their general assemblies or monthly meetings they contribute food and other needed materials to facilitate the meetings (Asela Kavishe, personal communication, 16 December 2016). For example, when the 2009 General Assembly of MVIWAMWA resolved to build an office, it never thought of raising any donor funding. They agreed to apply for a piece of land from the village assembly (of which they are members), and would make bricks themselves and erect the building using their own labour-power. Moreover, they also decided to strengthen their cooperation by establishing a block farm where all groups belonging to the networks would cultivate: again, there was no monetary budget for this (MVIWAMWA, 2009, p. 13).

On the other end of the spectrum, peasant groups and local networks at Peko/Misegese, Kikundi and Kungwe (MVIWAKIKU) and Kiroka (MVIWAKI) wards adopted a more donor-dependent approach. Most of them were established in the post-2008 era, as a result of donor-funded outreach programmes. Money comes often from corporations or related donor organizations to organize farmers in groups, potentially to be used as the base for modernization—for example, in the use of genetically modified (GM) seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides (Marcelina Charles Kibena, personal communication, 21 December 2015). They regard themselves as the highest manifestation of ignorance, self-inflicted poverty, backwardness and powerlessness. They believe that it is their clinging to outdated forms of production and the lack of entrepreneurial skills that keep them in perpetual poverty. They rarely see themselves as agents of change; change has to come from above and without, and they are to be passive and obedient recipients (Jiendeleze–Matema, 2014; MVIWAKI, 2012, p. 4).

The relationship between the dependent local groups and the middle/national level tends to be harmonious because they regard MVIWATA at middle and national levels as the liberator/donor, both financially and intellectually. In that regard, they beg for material assistance and intellectual guidance. They request the national and middle levels to tell them even the type of seeds they should plant, and ask for more training to raise their awareness. Because they lack the ‘expertise’ to write proposals to win donor funding, they rely on the national and middle levels to do the fundraising for them and bring donor-funded projects in their area. Usually, there is competition among dependent networks and groups to win favours from the middle and national levels. Such competition at times results in inter-group/network disagreements and conflictual relations. ⁷

Most of these groups and networks were established precisely through donor-funded projects, thus they expect to get money from donors. For example, the local network at Kiroka ward (MVIWAKI) established a block farm that was a demonstration plot, required by a donor-funded project brought to them by the national level. They requested MVIWATA to send them seeds and instruct them about the type of fertilizers they would use in their farms. Trained farmers had witnessed farming techniques at the demonstration plots at the fair and received explanations from the experts on how to conduct modern farming (MVIWAKI, 2012).

‘Governing’ the Movement

Internationally, MVIWATA is a member of such progressive organizations as LVC and claims to subscribe to LVC’s agenda of pro-peasant land reform, food sovereignty and agro-ecology. Yet, MVIWATA (especially at its national and middle levels) is heavily dependent on donor funding and receives money even from agencies, such as AGRA, USAID and the European Union, whose agenda is what MVIWATA claims to fight against. It also maintains a harmonious relationship with the government, even though the latter (especially between 1985 and 2015) undertook reforms that had adverse effects on smallholder peasants and other lower classes. It is not uncommon for government ministers and ruling party Ministers of Parliament to praise the organization in Parliament (Bunge la Tanzania, 2008, pp. 33–34; MVIWATA, 2013a; MVIWATA News, 2008, p. 1).

As it has been pointed earlier, most of the early donors were friendly smallholder farmers’ organizations from Europe. Behind their financial support, the spirit was to share experiences and learn from one another. Thus, exchange visits between these organizations and MVIWATA were emphasized. This changed in the mid-2000s, when most of the donors were the charity wings of Western governments and capitalist companies. Even though some of the donor-funded projects appeared to support MVIWATA’s agenda, in reality they subordinated it to the requirements of international capital.

Since 2004, MVIWATA has built seven rural markets, under the financial and technical support of the French Development Agency (FDA), and later, the EU. These are located in Morogoro (Tandai, Tawa and Nyandira markets), Dodoma (Kibaigwa market), Tanga (Mkata market), Iringa (Igagala market) and Mbeya (Igurusi market). According to MVIWATA, the rural markets have improved the lot of smallholder farmers (Stephen Ruvuga, personal communication, 25 April 2015; Anneth Muyombana, personal communication, 16 December 2016). Previously, they sold their produce to middlemen, whereby the farmers would accept lower prices and cheated through manipulated weighing scales. The rural markets have provided them with correct weighing tools and price information, as well as storage facilities. In some cases, MVIWATA has searched for potential buyers—whether private or government agencies—which are inclined to offer better prices to farmers (FERT & MVIWATA, 2009, p. 13; MVIWATA, 2013b, p. 33). Most importantly, the markets built by MVIWATA are managed by independent boards composed of smallholder farmers (from MVIWATA), cargo porters, petty traders operating in the market (FERT & MVIWATA 2009; Hasira Zahoro, personal communication, 9 October 2015). This, MVIWATA claims, resonates with the spirit of having famers ‘have control on market processes and get better prices’ (Ruvuga, 2014, p. 10).

However, by examining the connections of these markets with the larger global economic system, we find that they basically contribute to the further adverse integration of smallholders within the vertically structured global value chains and agribusiness circuits of accumulation. Indeed, MVIWATA has, on many occasions, promoted the continuity of an export-oriented model of agriculture at the expense of a local self-sustaining economy. For example, the government’s ban on the export of food crops was harshly opposed by MVIWATA in that it would hurt the interest of smallholder farmers (Ally, 2012). The rural markets also made MVIWATA speak the free-market rhetoric. Yazidi Makame, then the National Chairman of MVIWATA, who claimed to speak on behalf of his members, wrote that ‘during the forums, we, the Tanzanian farmers, loudly and clearly expressed the need for access to the resources necessary to fairly compete in the free market economy and to obtain a paying outlet for our agricultural produce’ (cf. FERT & MVIWATA, 2009).

MVIWATA versus Kilimo Kwanza

When the 2008 triple crisis of food, finance and energy hit the globe, the West came with two types of solutions. The short-term solution was the issuing of the financial bailout of capitalist companies. This happened not only in the USA but also in peripheral countries, with the intellectual and financial support of Western countries and the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). For example, Tanzania received USD 220 million from G20 countries and a USD 37.7 million grant from the USA, as a financial support to its ‘stimulus package’. Like the US bailout package, Tanzania’s Tshs 1.7 trillion stimulus package ended in the hands of local and foreign capitalists (Embassy of the United States, Tanzania, 2009; Lunogelo, Mbilinyi, & Hangi, 2010). The financial assistance for the stimulus package came with conditionalities, the main being the necessity for Tanzania to carry out a corporate-driven agrarian reform (an initiative which saw the involvement of President Obama himself, who visited the country in 2013, promoting a ‘partnership for Africa to aid its economy’), as the long-term solution to the capitalist crisis in core countries. It is in this regard that in 2009, the Government of Tanzania announced its Kilimo Kwanza (Agriculture First) initiative, as a local version of the Green Revolution. Kilimo Kwanza was to be operationalized through, inter alia, the SAGCOT, which would devote 7.5 million hectares of land to corporate-controlled agricultural production. The idea of agricultural corridors was a brainchild of Yara International, a Norwegian corporation, which was endorsed at different platforms including the Word Economic Forum and Tanzania enthusiastically embraced it. The Executive Committee of SAGCOT consists of giant corporations in agricultural inputs (Yara International, Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer CropScience AG, Unilever, Olam and Nestle), as well as foreign embassies and aid agencies, including USAID, the Royal Norwegian Embassy, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the World Economic Forum and the World Bank.

The MVIWATA was opposed to the Kilimo Kwanza initiative for two reasons. First, it claimed that Kilimo Kwanza was formulated without involving smallholder farmers (Mbunda, 2011, p. 20). Second, it prioritized the interests of giant agricultural corporations at the expense of smallholder farmers. It commissioned various studies on Kilimo Kwanza, which concluded that the implementation of the initiative had adverse impacts on smallholders in terms of land loss, but also control of their seeds and other inputs (Bengesi & Salanga, 2014; Gabagambi, 2013).

The giant corporations involved in Kilimo Kwanza had competing interests. The agricultural corporations were interested in acquisition of large tracts of land for production. They wanted the smallholders out (Wolter, 2010). On the contrary, agro-chemical corporations, such as Monsanto, Yara, DuPont and Bayer, saw African smallholder farmers as a reliable market for their inputs. Therefore, they presented themselves as friends to smallholder farmers and initiated outreach programmes aimed at transforming smallholder farmers into reliable and faithful users of patented GM seeds and other inputs (refer to, for instance, Monsanto, 2009, 2010, 2011). MVIWATA took an uncompromising stance against large-scale land acquisitions and used every strategy to sabotage the implementation. It supported, both morally and materially, grassroots movements against land grabs and made sure that the grievances of the dispossessed peasants were heard (MVIWATA, 2011b, p. 9; 2012, pp. 8–12). Its relationship with inputs giants was generally friendly, and, except for GMOs, MVIWATA campaigned for the government to spend more on inputs and avail them to smallholder farmers at a subsidized price. This set well with the agenda of the inputs giants.

While it declared war on GMOs, this did not go beyond rhetoric. As a matter of fact, MVIWATA was receiving funds from AGRA, USAID and EU, part of which came from the biotechnology corporations like Monsanto, to transform smallholders mindset on GM seeds, as well as other inputs (ACB, 2015, p. 28). As already discussed earlier, there were always tensions within the MVIWATA on the direction taken by the organization. While some units and sections of peasants welcomed the donor-funded transformational projects, others saw that MVIWATA had disowned its founding philosophy and was increasingly being manipulated by donors. The 2015 Peasant Manifesto, constitutional amendments, and the new Strategic Plan are a result of internal struggles, as they are a reflection of the political economic changes that have swept the country following the election of John Pombe Magufuli of the ruling CCM, in 2015.

MVIWATA and the Magufuli Government

Unlike President Kikwete, who was committed to the neoliberal project, at the guidance of imperialist countries and IFIs, President Magufuli’s initial reforms partially destabilized it. The new government has de-commodified primary and secondary education, destabilized financialization by removing government money from private banks, cut lavish government expenditure and reduced incidences of grand corruption—which represented a form of primitive accumulation of capital by a coalition of local and foreign elites (Nyamsenda, 2016). More recently, the Tanzanian government manifested its intention to revisit the regime of generous mining concessions, licenses, exemptions and tax breaks by asking Acacia, a subsidiary of the world’s largest gold mining company, Barrick Gold, to pay USD 190 billion in revised taxes, interest and fines as a condition to renew its concessions, which last year allowed for the extraction (along with Ango Gold Ashanti) of 74 tons of gold, making Tanzania the fourth largest gold producer in Africa (Paget, 2017).

Magufuli’s resource nationalism seems to be appreciated by MVIWATA, which issued a statement in praise of Magufuli’s reforms for its defence of the interest of small-scale farmers and other lower classes (MVIWATA, 2016b):

Specifically, we commend him for eliminating nuisance tax, charges and tariffs that were big burden to us. Also we applaud his order to reduce trade barriers on the main road so as traders can transport commodities including farmers produce at easy.

We would like also to commend the President for his decision to repossessing undeveloped pieces of land that were held by investors. The move has come at the right time where there is public outcry in many areas where their land was grabbed by people with financial muscles.

In 2016, Magufuli expressed his intention not to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), pushed on African, Caribbean and Pacific countries by the European Union. The EU-East African Community (EAC) EPA required EAC countries to remove tariffs on 83 per cent of imports from EU countries. No sooner had Magufuli announced his rejection than his East African counterparts from Kenya and Rwanda signed and approved the EPA. The MVIWATA, which had expressed its rejection of EPAs since 2009, came forward and mobilized grassroots support to back the President. It organized workshops in Morogoro and Manyara and conducted a media campaign against the EPAs. Later, the Parliament also picked up the matter and unanimously rejected the EPAs.

The MVIWATA-Magufuli partnership, however, is not easy. The President is increasingly taking an authoritarian route and has arbitrarily jailed his critics, including grassroots activists. The MVIWATA had insisted that Magufuli’s industrialization plan should not be pursued at the expense of smallholder farmers. When the government issued a Draft Land Policy (2016) in October 2016, MVIWATA criticized it, as it was in favour of large-scale investors. When MVIWATA approached Magufuli to officiate its 2016 AGM, the latter declined at the eleventh hour. He did not even send a representative, something that his neoliberal predecessor did. However, MVIWATA managed to bring the entire Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture and Fishery to its AGM. The MPs—most of them from the ruling party—were not happy with MVIWATA’s ‘activist tone’ and hinted that it could be the reason behind Magufuli’s refusal to attend MVIWATA’s AGM. It is clear that current government wants a depoliticized MVIWATA, one tamed by the government and focused on a narrow agenda of agricultural inputs and markets.

Conclusion

This study has explored the internal dynamics and contradictions of MVIWATA, looking at its trajectories of political discourse and practice, and situating it in the larger political economic context of neoliberalism in Tanzania. It has been argued that MVIWATA has grappled with class tensions that result from its organizational structure, the often conflicting sets of values and beliefs within the various social groups and their diverse political practices and discourses. Far from being homogenous entities, agrarian movements are highly differentiated social entities in which differential power and class relations often coalesce. These power differentials are also manifested in the relationships between grassroots and national organizational structures, with NGOs and donors, and with the Tanzanian state.

This study indicates the importance of understanding agrarian movements by placing them in relation to the larger set of social, economic, ideological and political forces. Doing so requires going beyond the limitations of the national level of analysis and understanding the multiple and inter-linked levels of interaction within the movements. By showing the existence of distinct political geographies within agrarian movements themselves, the study shows the significance of understanding agrarian movements across time, as the contextual politico-economic pressures in which they are embedded affect dynamics of agrarian change, and as a result the modes of political organizations, the framework of political opportunities and the very ways in which people understand their conditions of existence.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.