Harnessing large-scale agro-based investments in the SAGCOT area for inclusive agricultural transformation in Tanzania

Abstract

The colonial and post-colonial large-scale agriculture has brought the far-ranging implications on the local population in Tanzania. These include dispossession of land, dislocation of migrant labourers who are also subjected to poor work conditions and induced imbalances in terms of gender and ethnic relations. The government and other actors in Tanzania have strived to reduce the effects by fostering inclusive large-scale agriculture that benefit the small-scale farmers. This includes the move to initiate a 20-year public-private partnership on large-scale agribusiness namely Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SACGOT) in 2010. Serious concerns were raised against SAGCOT especially on the extent to which it entails uprooting and taking away lands from poor rural dwellers and turning them into poorly paid casual labourers thus increasing poverty and food insecurity. Consequently, the coordinating unit of SAGCOT vowed to improve food security to hundreds of thousands of poor farmers. The primary research was designed to examine the inclusivity aspects of the six selected largescale investment schemes under the SAGCOT partnership. The Responsible Agriculture Investment (RAI) Framework was employed to assess sustainable labour practices, community engagements and fairness in out-grower arrangements. While the investment schemes demonstrated a fairly positive outlook pertaining to social sustainability under the RAI framework, a notable variation was observed across the six schemes in relation to specific RAI indicators. For instance, a company that demonstrated the outstanding performance in corporate social responsibility also performed poorly in the domain of wages and employee relations. A set of sustainability benchmarks developed jointly by the SAGCOT Center and civil society organizations and implemented on voluntary basis by a few member investors need to be harmonized and monitored across all investment schemes. This is especially important for the small-scale sub-contracted firms which lacked the requisite skills and capacity to engage in a more sustainable manner.