Choose ONE of the following three prompts and reply in four sentences or less. 

What is the relationship between the global factory and the global farm?

Are women workers in the Chilean grape sector experiencing in situ displacement (see Chang for a definition)? Why or why not?

What are some key similarities and/or differences in the way that agriculture is reshaping gender relations and/or social reproduction in the Tanzanian and Chilean cases?

CHAPTER FIVE

Cheap Food

On his first voyage to the New World, Columbus paid far more
attention to potential returns from the sale of new plants than to the
food he ate. Aboard the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, diet followed a
protocol so regimented that there’s no mention of it in the first two
months of the ship’s log.1 When food does crop up, it’s two days
after first contact, when Columbus writes about an old man who
came on board and cried to his friends on the shore to bring the
sailors things to eat and drink. Columbus permitted himself the
rituals of gastrotourism a month later, on November 5, 1492, when
he tried some local food and reported that the Indigenous People
had “mames which are like carrots and have the flavor of chestnuts;
and they have faxones and beans of kinds very different from ours.”
But Columbus wasn’t there to taste test. The bulk of his notes look
like this: “There are a thousand other kinds of fruits, which it is
impossible for me to write about, and all must be profitable.”2

His daily rations—hardtack (a double-baked wheat biscuit) and a
range of cured meats and cheeses—didn’t matter enough to make it
into his journals. Only on the way home, on January 25, 1493, did he
report that the “sailors killed a tunny [dolphin] and a very large shark,
which was very welcome as they now had nothing but bread and
wine, and some yams from the Indies.”3

It is such food, the food that sustains working human bodies, that
is at the heart of our discussion in this chapter. Madeira’s sugar
revolution was a central and early part of capitalism’s ecology, and
Columbus himself introduced the plant to the New World, so that by
1506 it was widely and intensively cultivated on Hispaniola.4 But the

food that matters in that story is not the processed sugar that
Columbus and his kind conveyed from Madeira to Genoa but instead
the food of sailors and slave families, the sustenance that allows the
extraction of cheap work.5

Crop varieties matter to soil and human ecology. We cannot talk
about food in general but need to recognize its particularities and the
way that different crops have formed their own ecologies. Rice,
maize, and wheat—Fernand Braudel’s “plants of civilization”6—have
yielded very different forms of power, work, gastronomy, and nature:

Europe chose wheat, which devours the soil and forces it to rest regularly; this choice
implied and permitted the raising of livestock. Now, who can imagine the history of
Europe without oxen, horses, plows, and carts? As a result of this choice Europe has
always combined agriculture and animal husbandry. It has always been carnivorous.
Rice developed out of a form of gardening, an intensive cultivation in which man
could allow no room for animals. This explains why meat constitutes such a small
part of the diet in rice-growing areas. Planting corn is surely the simplest and most
convenient way to obtain one’s “daily bread.” It grows very rapidly and requires
minimal care. The choice of corn as a crop left free time, making possible the forced
peasant labor and the enormous monuments of the Amerindians. Society
appropriated a labor force that worked the land only intermittently.7

Although capitalism is often associated with coal- and oil-fueled
revolutions, transformations in the food system came first. Without
food surplus, there’s no work outside agriculture. The textbook
civilizations—the Sumerians and the Egyptians, the Hans and the
Romans, the Mayans and the Incas—grew through revolutions that
allowed fewer people to produce more food. The diversity of food
relations in the arc of human history from the Neolithic revolution to
the dawn of the sixteenth century is breathtaking.8 But they all
shared two common characteristics: a system of agricultural
productivity premised on land rather than labor, and a system of
controlling food surplus through politics rather than the market.

Capitalist agriculture transformed the planet. Some land became
the exclusive domain of specific kinds of crops and crop systems:
monocultures designed to bring in flows of cash. Other areas were
reserved to house those humans who had been excommunicated
from the work of growing on those lands and had gone to live more

closely together in places where their labors might be better
rewarded—the cities. Cities and fields have long been siblings,
bound by another timeless imperative: cheap food for the urban
poor. Everyone from Cicero to the imperial Chinese has understood
the importance of making sure that city dwellers are sufficiently well
fed to prevent urban discontent.9 What’s different about an ecology
of cash agriculture is the single-minded focus on profit and the drive
for cheap food to feed urban workers and their families not just to
prevent riots but also to keep work cheap. As we have seen in the
chapters on work and care, maintaining a system of wage work is
expensive and becomes more so over time. Cheap food enables that
expensive system to yield riches. Those riches flowed through
infrastructures of power and production that created a new ecology
of the city and the country. Like the relation between employers and
workers, it was profoundly unequal. A rural-urban ecology is woven
into the fabric of capitalism, one whose patterns formed through
Atlantic frontiers, major European cities, the Indian Ocean, and
Asia’s spice routes.

HOW FOOD MADE THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD

By 1700, most English peasants had been either reduced to
cottagers, pushed into agricultural wage work, or forced off the land
and into cities—61 percent of England’s working population was
doing something other than growing food. The proportion of city
dwellers had doubled over the previous century.10 The enclosures of
the previous two centuries had made agriculture a competitive
business, and a cluster of innovations—new ploughs, crop rotations,
and drainage systems especially—had made it biologically
productive. While historians debate the precise timing of its
agricultural revolution, it’s clear that by 1700 England was doing the
two big things that every great capitalist power must: increasing the
agricultural surplus and expelling labor from the farm.11 It could expel
labor from the farm because it was productive in a new sense: labor

productivity advanced rapidly, rising nearly 46 percent between 1500
and 1700.12

English agriculture was so robust at the dawn of the eighteenth
century that it was able to rescue a rapidly proletarianizing Europe
from hunger. While we tend to think of industrialization as producing
new workers, it’s truer to say that the expulsion of labor from
agriculture favors new forms of industrialization. Europe’s wage-
earning population may have grown by as much as sixty million in
the two centuries after 1550, and these workers had to be fed
cheaply. Every global factory needs a global farm. That global farm
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been Poland, whose
wheat and rye filled the bellies of Dutch fishers, sawyers, and peat
cutters. By 1700, however, Poland’s exports had collapsed—in great
measure from soil exhaustion. For the next half century, England
was western Europe’s granary, its exports growing fivefold. Grain
prices held stable in western European cities as a result—but for
capitalism, ever hungry for economic growth, stability is never
enough.13 Food prices in England—and across northern Europe—
fell.14

England’s triumph was short lived. Like Poland before it, the
island saw its agricultural revolution stall. Farmers progressively
“cashed in” their biological reserves.15 By 1750, a tipping point was
reached. Grain exporting ground to a halt. Productivity growth
slowed, and food prices rose.16 Even with sharply rising imports from
Ireland, English food prices increased twice as fast as the industrial
price index, climbing 66 percent faster than textile prices and 48
percent faster than coal prices between 1770 and 1795.17

If this were simply an English phenomenon, it mightn’t matter, but
productivity slowed, inequality widened, and food became more
expensive throughout the Atlantic world. Labor productivity fell or
stagnated across western Europe in the half century after 1750.18 In
France the price of bread rose three times faster than wages before
1789’s Revolution.19 In central Mexico too, yields declined, and the
price of maize rose 50 percent toward the end of the century.20
Across Europe between 1730 and 1810, the price of “the chief bread

grains” (wheat and rye above all) soared: 250 percent in England
and more than 200 percent in northern Italy, Germany, Denmark,
Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands. France experienced lower
rates of food price inflation—163 percent in this period—but that was
hardly enough to forestall massive social unrest.21

By 1760 there were signs of a fundamental change in the English
countryside that marked the triumph of agrarian capitalism—as well
as its exhaustion. In response to an increasing number of food
rebellions across the country and rising grain prices,22 the scale and
tempo of parliamentary enclosure jumped sharply, an attempt to
rekindle a flare of productivity by repeating the cause of the
agricultural boom. Six times as many Enclosure Acts were passed
between 1760 and 1790 as in the three decades prior.23 In the
century after 1750, a quarter of England’s cultivated land, previously
open fields and commons, was privatized.24

This ecology was premised on cheap nature and cheap work, but
it also needed cheap food. Cheap food is “cheap” in a specific
sense: more calories produced with less average labor time in the
commodity system. Certainly, some noncapitalist modes of
cultivation have enjoyed very high levels of food production with
modest effort. In early nineteenth-century Brazil, swidden agriculture
—in which cultivators clear plots of forest for cultivation, then repeat
the cycle after several harvests—could yield between 7,000 and
17,600 calories of manioc, maize, and sweet potatoes for every hour
of work. By way of contrast, this was somewhere between three and
five times greater than England’s labor productivity at the same
time.25 But nowhere was rising labor productivity in agriculture
sustained for large concentrated populations until the rise of
capitalism.

The cheap food model worked like this. Capitalism’s agricultural
revolutions provided cheap food, which lowered the minimum-wage
threshold: workers could be paid less and not starve. This in turn
reduced employers’ wage bills as the scale of proletarianization
increased, allowing the rate of exploitation to rise. Accumulated
capital could continue to grow only insofar as a rising food surplus

underwrote “cheap” workers.26 It is a simple model. This system of
cheap food didn’t emerge on purpose, but understanding its
emergence in capitalism’s ecology makes it possible to think of and
see the world differently—including how the imperatives of providing
cheap food have helped to create the modern world.

We quoted Braudel on rice, maize, and wheat—but a central part
of Britain’s calorie intake in the Industrial Revolution was New World
sugar. As Kenneth Pomeranz notes, “Replacing Britain’s 1801
consumption of Caribbean sugar with locally grown calories would
have required 850,000 to 1.2 million acres of the best wheat land; by
1831—still before the great fall in sugar prices and quintupling of
per-capita consumption that followed—the figure is 1.2 to 1.6
million.”27 The story of capitalism is a global one, from the belly out.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European
governments tried to manage food prices in cities, not always
successfully. There were bread riots, led overwhelmingly by women,
whose provision of care and dependence on markets put them on
the front lines of battles over cheap food.28 The most famous began
the French Revolution. In 1789, as the food-price crisis worsened,
Parisian women marched on Versailles to get “the Baker, the Baker’s
wife, and the Baker’s son” (the king and his family).29 Two years
later, a sugarcane colony rose against its French colonizers, with
aspirations to the kinds of liberty, equality, and fraternity that were
rallying cries in the metropole. Nor were the Haitian and French
uprisings alone in an era of worldwide agrarian revolt that stretched
from Russia to Peru to North America.30

To feed their workers, empires needed food. The Russian
revolutionary Vladimir Lenin quoted Cecil Rhodes, the colonialist
whose patrician statue has only just been torn down from the steps
of the University of Cape Town, as saying in 1895, “I was in the East
End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the
unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry
for ‘bread’, ‘bread’, ‘bread’, and on my way home I pondered over
the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance
of imperialism… . The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and

butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become
imperialists.”31 Two decades later, in 1917, Lenin found himself at
the center of a revolution whose slogan was “Peace, Land, and
Bread,” building on years of bread riots led, as in the French
Revolution 130 years earlier, by women.32

Empire provided Europe’s industrial workers with cheap food,
though at huge cost to people in other parts of the planet. European
empire created networks of commodity trade that made the Third
World, as Mike Davis argues.33 One example from an old British
colony demonstrates the generalized contempt for peasants held
throughout European empires. During the 1845–48 potato famine,
poverty and market forces instructed the Irish to work for a living,
even if there was no employment to be had and no food they could
afford: at the height of the famine, Ireland was exporting around
three hundred thousand tons of grain a year to feed the mother
country. That the ensuing famine would destroy large parts of the
Irish population was, if anything, a bonus. Charles Trevelyan, the
British assistant secretary to the Treasury, who controlled funds for
famine relief, was quite clear on the matter: “the real evil” was “not
the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil … of the [Irish]
people.”34 Trevelyan received a knighthood for his services to the
realm while Ireland starved, and wrote that as a way of curbing
unchecked Irish population growth, “the famine is a direct stroke of
an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.”35

Other British colonies were subject to the same forces. Indian
customs of feeding the poor were replaced, at gunpoint, by free
market relations so that India could export grain.36 As we saw in
chapter 2’s discussion of money, military force is never far from
financial power, and sometimes the latter can be wielded to pay for
the former. Under colonial rule, India was tasked with funding,
through taxation, Britain’s worldwide imperialism: “Ordinary Indians
… paid for such far-flung adventures of the Indian army as the
sacking of Beijing (1860), the invasion of Ethiopia (1868), the
occupation of Egypt (1882), and the conquest of the Sudan (1896–
98).”37 Colonial exploitation intensified yet further when Germany

and the United States—and quickly Japan and the rest of Europe—
joined Britain on the gold standard after 1871. The value of India’s
silver-based rupees collapsed by more than a third between 1873
and 1894—while its payments to Britain were denominated in gold.38

Market mechanisms and violence went hand in hand with the
flow of cheap food from Asia to Europe. When Britain’s warships
blockaded China’s Pearl River in November 1839, the struggle was
over silver and opium—the latter cultivated on plantations across
India. The East India Company had monopolized the production and
trade of opium at the end of the eighteenth century. A rapidly
growing volume of opium found its way—illegally but profitably—to
China. The Chinese didn’t need to trade with the English, but the
English wanted Chinese tea. And for this they needed silver. With
the opium trade, Eric Wolf wryly observes, “the Europeans finally
had something to sell to the Chinese.”39 That trade was threatened
in 1839 when the Chinese government “refused British smugglers
food, water and trade until they promised to stop hauling their
shipfuls of opium into China.”40 The first of two Opium Wars was
waged over the next few years. At stake was control of the Chinese
market. As China was progressively opened to European power and
commerce after 1842, among the greatest windfalls for the British
was their ability to secure tea plants. By 1851, Robert Fortune had
moved some two thousand tea plants and seventeen thousand tea
seeds from China—via Hong Kong, then under British control—to
the Botanic Garden in Calcutta.41 By the end of the century, the
English were drinking tea grown in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), not
China.42

Britain turned botanical imperialism into something of an art.
Rubber seeds were smuggled out of Brazil, nurtured at the Royal
Botanical Gardens at Kew in London, and trialed in south and
southeast Asia. Sisal, used to manufacture rope and agricultural
twine, made a similar migration, from southern Mexico to Asia. For
colonial expansion to overcome the malaria endemic to tropical
latitudes, cinchona—the source of quinine—was cultivated and
spread far from its native home in Brazil.43

One of the more significant agricultural innovations emerged, like
so many before it, as a result of war and geopolitics: fertilizer. Until
the early twentieth century, most inorganic fertilizer was mined.
Saltpeter—potassium nitrate (KNO3)—was an important mineral in
agriculture and in gunpowder. In Europe, tensions around managing
such food supply inputs helped, as the historian Avner Offer argues,
to precipitate the First World War.44 The Allies oversaw the blockade
of Chilean saltpeter mines as a means to cripple German and
Austro-Hungarian food supplies, and military campaigns spurred the
commercial development of prewar technologies of atmospheric
nitrogen fixing, pioneered by the German chemists Fritz Haber and
Carl Bosch.45 Their actions transformed the earth: planetary nitric
oxide (NO) and ammonia (NH3) levels are now five times their pre-
1800 levels,46 and the energy required to manufacture ammonia
comes directly from cheap fossil fuel, as we discuss in chapter 6.
This is one of the reasons why up to ten calories of oil are now
required to produce a single calorie of food.47

The twentieth century saw other changes that made these
biotechnological interventions seem trivial. The spread of
revolutionary communist ideas was the realization of Rhodes’s fears
and those of his fellow bourgeois. The Russian Revolution was every
capitalist’s nightmare made real—and governments sought ways to
manage and accommodate restive workers rather than run the risk
of falling under their hammers and sickles. A former Spanish colony,
Mexico, was the site of one such compromise among workers,
capitalists, and the state.

The 1910 Mexican Revolution began as an affair of the middle
class but soon began to exceed it, with workers and peasants
making militant demands. In 1934, Lázaro Cárdenas was elected
Mexico’s president on a platform to meet those demands: he
instituted wide-ranging land reform, redistributing 47 percent of all
cultivatable land48—and began to nationalize the assets of the oil
industry, including the refineries of the Standard Oil Company.
Control over cheap energy was a central part of the project of
Mexican corporatism.

For the Standard Oil Company’s founding family, the
Rockefellers, this was nothing short of an outrage. It was also further
evidence of the grave threat posed by a growing population and a
limited food supply. There was a general fear among the American
ruling class that Malthus’s prediction might come true: a collapse of
society precipitated when an urban population’s hunger outstrips its
food supply.

Philanthropists set themselves the task of saving society. “The
World Food Problem, Agriculture, and the Rockefeller Foundation,” a
strategic document issued by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1951,
almost a decade after it had begun to work in Mexico, crystallized
the themes of insurgency, population, and food: “Whether additional
millions … will become Communists will depend partly on whether
the Communist world or the free world fulfils its promises. Hungry
people are lured by promises, but they may be won by deeds.
Communism makes attractive promises to underfed peoples.
Democracy must not only promise as much, but must deliver
more.”49

The foundation went to work in Mexico in 1943, recruiting a
brilliant young plant breeder, Norman Borlaug, to develop crops to
prevent urban hunger. That it was urban and not rural hunger that
troubled policy makers is vitally important. Food and employment for
people in rural areas—where most of the world’s hunger was
concentrated—was of little concern. Hunger began to matter
politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into
anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the
rule of cheap nature. It’s here—in the bourgeois concern about that
rule and its need for worker quiescence—that we find the origin of
what came to be known as the Green Revolution.

The term Green Revolution is one to savor. It was coined in 1968
by William Gaud, an administrator of the United States Agency for
International Development, who spoke glowingly of a range of
interventions: “[Recent] developments in the field of agriculture
contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red
Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like

that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.”50 In other
words, the Green Revolution used agriculture, new crop varieties,
fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, landholding mechanisms, marketing
approaches, and state power to maintain cheap labor, care, raw
materials, and—to acknowledge Iran’s impact on international oil
markets—energy.

Mexico’s Green Revolution program is the embodiment of the
regime of cheap food. The orthodox narrative says that Borlaug
“realized that Mexico’s traditional wheat-growing highland areas
could not produce enough wheat to make the country self-sufficient
in wheat production.”51 So he set about breeding varieties that would
allow cheap wheat to flow freely in urban areas. For this work he was
awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and such is the allure of this
history of the Green Revolution that governments and philanthropists
have sought to repeat its success elsewhere, recently through the
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. But the official story of the
Green Revolution doesn’t have it quite right about Mexico. For the
majority of Mexican peasants, corn (maize) was a far more important
crop than wheat. Nearly ten times more land was planted with corn
(4,781,759 hectares, or 11,815,984 acres) than wheat (555,756
hectares, or 1,373,303 acres) in 1950.52 Wheat tended to be grown
by commercial farmers with models and resources more comparable
to their US counterparts than those of corn production. Similarly,
when the Green Revolution was introduced into India, the crop at the
spear tip of research investment was corn, which accounted for less
than 3 percent of the country’s agricultural output and isn’t a staple
there at all.53

Seed technology wasn’t the only mechanism needed for certain
crops to jump continents and begin to be cultivated globally. The
Green Revolution required agricultural extension services and
government field workers to proselytize on behalf of the new crops. It
also needed national governments to subsidize farmers, through
agricultural marketing boards, to grow more of those crops. Cheap
food required the suppression of political dissent. The Green
Revolution was, after all, a package of reforms designed to prevent

the Red revolutionary political goal of many peasants’ and landless
workers’ movements: comprehensive land and agrarian reform.
That’s why, in its implementation, the Green Revolution was often an
authoritarian program.54

It’s possible to see the Green Revolution as a success. Globally,
grain output more than doubled—and yields, the amount of output
per unit area, more than doubled—between 1950 and 1980. In the
heartlands of the Green Revolution, yields grew even faster. India’s
wheat yields shot up 87 percent between 1960 and 1980, close to
what American corn farmers experienced in the two decades after
1935.55 A rising share of all this food was traded on the world
market, with global grain exports increasing 179 percent over the
1960s and 1970s.56 The political commitment to making food cheap
through state subsidy and violence worked. Food prices declined 3
percent a year between 1952 and 1972, three times faster than the
already steep decline in commodity prices across the twentieth
century.57 Real prices for rice, maize, and wheat declined yet further
from 1976 to 2002.58 Perhaps the greatest success was the effective
quieting of peasant demands for land reform and urban demands for
political change.

Yet the long Green Revolution’s prodigious output achievements
did not reduce hunger. If China—where the agricultural revolution
was decidedly redder but no less productive for it—is removed from
the analysis, the ranks of the hungry swelled by more than 11
percent over the course of the Green Revolution.59 And while
reporters are happy to celebrate the fact that “India’s wheat
production doubled” from 1965 to 197260 and rose steadily
throughout the 1970s, the amount that Indians actually ate hardly
improved over the same period.

Figure 4. Food and protein supply in India. Source: FAOSTAT, www.fao.org/faostat/en/.

India’s pesticide consumption increased seventeenfold from 1955
to 2005, with a large share of that directed at the state of Punjab.61
Communities where the Green Revolution was practiced most
intensively have, more recently, become cancer clusters, with some
areas officially declared “cancer stricken villages.”62 But again, the
Green Revolution wasn’t directed toward Indian villagers—just those
workers in the urban cash nexus who might nurse ideas about
defecting from capitalism. Through trade agreements, subsidies, and
technology, governments have managed food prices, particularly for
staples and processed food. Indeed, it is a global phenomenon that
from 1990 to 2015, prices of processed food rose far less than those
of fresh fruits and vegetables.63 To get their recommended daily five
fresh fruits and vegetables, residents of low-income countries would
need to spend at least half of their household income on just these
five healthy items, with households in rural areas spending a greater
percentage: 70 percent of rural residents in low-income countries

http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/

can’t afford to buy three servings of the cheapest vegetables or two
servings of fruit.64

Since 1990, wage rates for workers in countries in the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have
been relatively static. This was a direct consequence, as we noted in
chapter 3, of anti-labor policies that scholars aptly call “wage
repression.” Given consistently low wages in the neoliberal era, it
makes sense to look at cheap food as cheap not merely relative to
wage costs but directly in terms of price. When we do, it emerges as
no accident that a foodstuff whose price has fallen dramatically is
chicken in Mexico—a direct consequence of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), technology, and the US soybean
industry. NAFTA originally excluded agricultural goods, but they were
included at the insistence of the Mexican government, which wanted
to “modernize” its peasantry by moving them from agriculture into
urban circuits of industry.65 The strategy worked: Mexico’s
campesino agricultural economy buckled, as evinced by the 2003 El
Campo No Aguanta Más (The countryside can’t take it anymore)
protests throughout the country.66 Circuits of migration and pools of
labor for US agriculture were the result. But at least the chicken was
cheap.

Meat has been at the epicenter of the global dietary
transformation since the 1970s. As we consider the future of the long
Green Revolution, we turn to examine both how we became an
increasingly carnivorous planet and how the logic that allows meat to
be manufactured cheaply is twinned with the rise of “nutritionism,” a
way of treating “hunger not by directly addressing poverty but by
prioritizing the delivery of individual molecular components of food to
those lacking them.”67 A grim future of cheap food presents itself.

Figure 5. Percentage real annual food price changes in Mexico (MX), South Korea (KR),
Brazil (BR), China (CH), and the United Kingdom (UK), 1990–2012. Source: Wiggins and
Keats 2015, 10.

FROM VEGETABLES WITH A LITTLE MEAT TO POVERTY
WITH ADDED VITAMINS

The Canadian food scholar Tony Weis has pointed to the scale of
recent changes in meat consumption: “In 1961, just over three billion
people ate an average of 23 kg [51 pounds] of meat and 5 kg [11
pounds] of eggs a year. By 2011, 7 billion people ate 43 kg [95
pounds] of meat and 10 kg [22 pounds] of eggs a year… . In a mere
half-century, from 1961 to 2010, the global population of slaughtered
animals leapt from roughly 8 to 64 billion, which will double again to
120 billion by 2050 if current rates of growth continue.”68

To those with a romantic view of where their food comes from,
meat appears to be a raw ingredient rather than a processed one.
Yet the industrial labor techniques of simplification,

compartmentalization, and specialization first developed in sugar
production have found their way into meat production too. Feed and
oilseed crops, made possible in the Global South partly by the
spread of the Green Revolution, form part of what Weis terms “the
industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex.”69 The creation of markets
for uniform grain and meat commodities—such as the Chicago
Board of Trade—made it possible for these commodities to become
not only cheap food but the backing for financial instruments. These
instruments in turn require the uniformity, homogenization, and
industrialization of the crops they transform.70 Such industry
demands the invention of new veterinary practices—from intensive
breeding to hormonal supplementation to antibiotic use to
concentrated animal feeding operations—which have had globally
transformative effects on the quality of food, soil, water, and air. Raw
meat in the supermarket is, in other words, cooked up by a
sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism’s ecology.

One result is a meat-production system that can turn a fertile egg
and a nine-pound (four-kilogram) bag of feed into a five-pound (two-
kilogram) chicken in five weeks.71 Turkey production times almost
halved between 1970 and 2000, down to twenty weeks from egg to
thirty-five-pound (sixteen-kilogram) bird.72 Other animals have seen
similar advances from a combination of breeding, concentrated
feeding operations, and global supply chains. Half of the world’s pork
is eaten in China, and its feed import sources are a planetary affair.
As are the consequences: 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions are from livestock production.73 One pound
(about half a kilogram) of beef requires 1,799 gallons (6,810 liters) of
water and seven pounds (three kilograms) of feed to produce.74

The environmental consequences of meat production are, of
course, external to the profit calculus of the industrial food system.
This is one of the reasons why meat is so cheap. Cheap labor is
another. The danger is to see “factory farming” as an environmental
question and “factory production” as a social question. Given the
centrality of cheap labor power in the US neoliberal meat-packing
sector, we might also point out the centrality of Latino immigrants.

The delivery of this cheap work was made possible by class
restructuring on two fronts. One, in the United States, was a strong
movement in the 1980s by newly aggressive meat-packing firms—
such as Hormel—to destroy union power and replace unionized
workers with low-wage immigrant labor.75 The other was the
destabilization of Mexico’s agrarian order after 1994 by NAFTA,
which resulted in flows of cheap immigrant labor, unemployed
workers displaced by capitalism’s ecology from one side of the US
border to the other.76

Despite the considerable environmental and governmental
subsidies afforded the meat industry, many people are unable to
afford its products. For them the private sector and the international
development community have offered an alternative: improved
nutrition of industrially produced plant-based food. This is more than
a little ironic: industrialization and the Green Revolution bred nutrition
out of many of the staples in the food system.77 Those nutrients
were casualties of the drive to maximize the yield, shelf life, and
consumer acceptability of a standardized commodity. Reintroducing
them is a means of increasing the profitability of an ultraprocessed
food substance. In a way, the logic of cheap meat production comes
full circle, with additives in food designed not to produce profitable
animal flesh but to sustain cheap human labor, which, in its turn, will
produce more profit further down the line.

You can see this logic at work most acutely in the Global South.
The G8’s 2013 summit was titled “Nutrition for Growth: Beating
Hunger through Business and Science,” which points rather clearly
to the direction of its—and its partners’—thought. It launched an
initiative on hunger, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition,
to bring the work of the long Green Revolution to Africa. Recall that
the Green Revolution began in the twentieth century as an
intervention in class politics, a way to manage the political concerns
of hungry and angry urban insurgents. The New Alliance was built on
foundations suggested at the World Economic Forum—a group of
business interests that the Financial Times once called the “masters

of the universe”78—to address concerns of urban unrest while
developing markets for agriculture and food industries.

This helps explain why the New Alliance’s largest donor is Yara,
the Norwegian fertilizer giant. Yara is keen to address the decades of
export-oriented asset stripping of African soils. Deficiencies of
nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, selenium, and other trace
elements are a result of their shipment away both under colonial
regimes and after independence, in the latter case to repay the
World Bank Structural Adjustment Loans taken out by postcolonial
countries in the 1980s and 1990s.

It’s not just soil that’s ripe for amendment—humans are too. The
G8 plan requires that foreign corporations be granted increased
access to African markets and land and that African bodies be
supplemented with fortified processed food to manage some of the
diseases associated with poverty and an inability to access food.
This is the quintessence of the era of poverty with added vitamins,
an agricultural policy that makes it harder for the rural poor to thrive
in farming but treats their penury with micronutrients, a policy that
combines exploitation with a strategy to prolong and manage that
exploitation.79

Here we come to an important point about cheap food regimes:
they guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well
—as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition
can attest. Indeed, capitalism’s cheap food regimes are, as Farshad
Araghi quips, hunger regimes.80

Meanwhile, capitalism’s agricultural frontiers continue to press
against the world’s peasants, who provide 75 percent of the food in
large parts of the Global South.81 But while the present is bleak, with
agricultural frontiers pushing through Amazonia and displacing
peasants around the world, a new wrinkle has appeared in the
twenty-first century that will fatally undermine capitalism’s five-
century-long food regime: climate change. The imagery of the
frontier lends itself easily to thinking only about land. But the past
two centuries have witnessed a very different kind of frontier

movement: the enclosure of the atmospheric commons as a
dumping ground for greenhouse gas emissions.

In the twenty-first century, agriculture and forestry (which includes
land clearance for cash cropping) contribute between a quarter and
a third of greenhouse gas emissions.82 They have to, because
they’re profoundly energy intensive and have become more so since
the 1940s.83 That’s a big problem, because there are no more
atmospheric commons to enclose and no obvious way to keep the
costs of climate change off capitalism’s ledgers. Nowhere is this
clearer than in the faltering global farm, whose productivity growth
has been slowing, just as it did for English farmers in the middle of
the eighteenth century. In American grain agriculture, labor
productivity growth has slowed by a third since the 1980s, and Indian
wheat yield growth declined by 80 percent between the 1980s and
1990s.84 Agrobiotechnology’s promise of a new agricultural
revolution has so far been worse than empty—failing to deliver a
new yield boom, creating superweeds and superbugs that can
withstand glyphosate and other poisons, and sustaining the cheap
food model that is driving the ongoing state shift in the world’s
climate system.85

Frontiers always allowed cash-crop agriculture to boom by
treating soil, work, and life as props to advance labor productivity.
Climate change represents something much more than a closing
frontier—it is something akin to an implosion of the cheap nature
model, bringing not the end of easy and cheap natures but a
dramatic reversal. As a growing body of research demonstrates,
climate change suppresses agricultural productivity. Climate refers to
extremely diverse phenomena, including drought, extreme rainfall,
heat waves, and cold snaps. Braudel’s “plants of civilization”—plus
soy, the paradigmatic neoliberal crop—have already experienced
what agronomists call yield suppression as a result of anthropogenic
climate change. How much remains a matter of debate, but many
analyses land somewhere in the ballpark of a 3 percent reduction in
yields since the 1980s—a value of five billion dollars per year from
1981 to 2002.86

Worse, climate change promises absolute declines. Each
successive degree Celsius increase in average annual global
temperature is accompanied by a greater risk of nonlinear and
dramatic effects on global farming. Agricultural yields will decline
between 5 and more than 50 percent in the next century, depending
on the time frame, crop, location, and extent to which carbon
continues to be pumped into the air at today’s prodigious rates.87
World agriculture will absorb two-thirds of all climate change costs by
2050.88 That means that not just the climate but also capitalism’s
agricultural model is in the midst of a state shift, one of the abrupt
and irreversible moments of change we encountered in the
introduction. Bound up with the global factory and global family has
been the global farm. With climate change, that food system will
break in the coming century.

Through climate change, the end of cheap food threatens a
dramatic end for capitalism’s ecology, but such food made it possible
for cheap workers to survive. Food is not, however, the only
requirement for cheap care to be sustained. Historically, after the
cost of food, the most important cost facing workers throughout
Europe from the sixteenth century on was that of energy. Indeed, it is
through the atmospheric consequences of cheap energy that cheap
food will end. To understand how, it is to cheap energy that we now
turn.

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Rural Fruit Workers in the North 127

it provides for women. Rachel and Ximena were important actors in
making it acceptable for women to work seasonally in the grape
economy. In the neighbourhood where they had grown up it was
accepted that women would go out to work and so once they arrived
in Tome Alto, they wanted to continue working. Although originally
they went to find work without first asking their partners’ permission,
it soon became apparent that they could earn substantial amounts of
money during a traditionally quiet period in the village and at the
same time continue with their domestic responsibilities. In part it is
the specific nature of seasonal work that has allowed women to move
into the labour market and stay there. For example, the temporary
nature of the work in export agriculture is seen as an advantage in
that women perceive it as allowing them to combine their traditional
role in the home with paid work, and the disruption of their domestic
responsibilities is only for part of the year. This ‘benefit’ is reinforced
by the wages they can hope to earn as a supplement to their male
partner’s income. The roles of campesina and temporera are therefore
juggled by these women on a seasonal basis, although for them their
traditional role is the primary one.

Alicia lives in the neighbouring settlement of Chanaral Alto, a
village unlike Tome Alto, in that it has been the site of significant
expansion of the grape economy. Alicia and her husband sold their
own land in the early 1970s when tomato production became
unprofitable. Her husband found work on the irrigation system while
she stayed at home and raised their five children. Alicia first began
to work in the grapes in 1983 and always chooses a farm where there
are a lot of local people rather than migrant workers. She views the
work in a very positive light for two main reasons. The first is the
added financial security the extra wage provides – for example, with
her money from the grapes she has been able to buy a washing
machine, a radio and clothes. The second is the break in the domes-
tic routine that her work gives her. Although the work is extremely
arduous, with long working days, Alicia looks forward each year to
her seasonal work:

He [her husband] gives me permission to work because he knows
that I relax. I get better because I have all sorts of ailments, I should
be worse through working, but instead I feel a lot better. So he
leaves me in peace to get on with it. I don’t see the children as much
as I would like, but you know for my health I work. I feel better
when I go to work. (Alicia)

128 Women and Agribusiness

Alicia and her husband now run a bottle shop from the front room
of their house, and Alicia has equal responsibility for the ownership
and running of the business. In effect she is able to combine multiple
roles as housewife, mother, self-employed shop owner and temporera
in the grape economy. For her the work in the grape packing plants
offers a chance to relax and let other family members take over the
responsibility for the house. In this respect her husband has been rela-
tively accommodating by helping to take care of the children when
they were younger and helping with the household chores. In fact,
Alicia feels that her husband is quite enlightened and moreover has
learned something of the burden of the domestic routine: ‘He realises
that the role of mother is not easy, every day the same routine, but I’m
lucky because he thanks me for the work I do.’

For Marta, who is 23 and lives with her parents in Chanaral Alto,
her work in the grape economy has been economically vital and has
become more so now that she has a small son. Her parents were
originally from Carcamo, a remote and impoverished village, which
still lacks many basic amenities. Her father arrived to work on the
tomatoes in Chanaral Alto in 1968 and her mother followed soon
after because there was no doctor in Carcamo to care for their chil-
dren. Marta went to school in Chanaral Alto until year 8 and then fol-
lowed the normal pattern by boarding in Ovalle. She completed a
diploma in nutrition but has never had the opportunity to use her
skills in her work. She first began to work on the grapes with a group
of girlfriends during the summer school holidays when she was 16. She
has always worked for the largest plant in Chanaral Alto. She used to
enjoy her work in the packing plants, but recently has been less enam-
oured of the hard, repetitive and pressurised working conditions:

I like my job, more or less, but lately I have not been enjoying it as
much. I realise that the work in the grapes is the only possibility to
earn a little bit more. You’re on your feet all day long. Yes, on your
feet because if you sit down you slow yourself down. And you can
find that you are very, very tired, but you have to put the tiredness
aside because if you stop, well it’s fewer boxes, and fewer boxes
means less money that you can earn, because out of 1,000 pesos,
100 is a lot to lose. (Marta)

In 1990 she became pregnant by a seasonal worker from the south.
She is uncertain whether he even knows about his son – he certainly
does not contribute to his upbringing. This increased the pressure on
her to find employment and during the winter of 1993 she travelled

Rural Fruit Workers in the North 129

north to Iquique in search of work. Through friends of her sister
she found employment as a vendor. In total she was able to earn
CH$70,000 (US$167), but this was reduced to CH$56,000 (US$134)
after deductions. With the rent and the money she sent back each
week to her mother who was taking care of her young son, she was
unable to save very much.

She is uncertain about the future, knowing that there is little for her
in Chanaral Alto. Marta would ideally like to use her nutritional skills
planning meals in a hospital, but realises that her biggest problem will
be leaving her son. For her, Chanaral Alto has lost much of its charm.
She no longer enjoys going out to parties and discos as she did when
she was younger and suggests that there are many more things for
men to do than for women. For Marta the seasonality of the work in
the grape economy is the greatest problem, as she needs regular local
employment to enable her to take care of her son. While she does not
have to overcome opposition from a male partner in order to work,
she feels keenly the problem of leaving her son behind to search for
alternative work:

There’s nothing here for me, so last year I went to Iquique and I
still didn’t find a job in what I learned and so I became a vendor and
it went well. I don’t know what I’ll do next. They say that there are
possibilities to work in the grapes further down the valley. I think
it’s in March and April so that’s where I’ll go and look for work,
but as long as it’s close to my son. Because when I was in Iquique,
which is very far away, he lost his affection for me, because he now
no longer calls me ‘mama’, he calls be ‘auntie’. (Marta)

Patricia has two children (both girls) and lives with her partner in
one of the larger houses in Chanaral Alto. She was born in Vina del
Mar in central Chile and came to live in Chanaral Alto when her
mother separated from her father. Her mother’s family are from the
region. Patricia was educated in a technical college in Ovalle and is a
qualified nursery nurse. When she finished her education she was preg-
nant and went to live in southern Chile with her boyfriend who was
working for Soprole, a large company making dairy products. They
came to visit her mother during one vacation and decided to stay
because the village was expanding and there were opportunities to
work on the grapes. Her partner works all year on the grapes while she
works during the summer harvest, cleaning and packing the grapes.
She estimated that during a good week she could earn CH$60,000
(US$143) and in a bad week CH$20,000 (US$48). For the rest of the

130 Women and Agribusiness

year she works in the local government office dealing with the electoral
roll. Although she earns only CH$1,500 (US$3.60) for a half day’s
work, she enjoys the security offered by the job compared to work on
the grapes. It is also much more sociable and civilised compared to
working in the fields all day ‘where your face is burned and your hands
freeze’. She described the rationale for her decision to work:

I work so as not be bored, not to waste any time. So with that job [in
the packing plant] I have another salary and can buy other things
for myself, small luxuries. On the other hand, with the job in the
office I have more security, this is a government job so it is more
secure. It’s more like a job for the future. (Patricia)

Throughout 1993 she was able to combine her work with childcare
because her daughter was at school while she worked in the office and
they spent the afternoons in the house. The following year presented
more problems because her older daughter would be at school out of
office hours and she also had to care for her new baby. One solution
was to have a female friend, also with young children, come to live
with her and between them work out a system for taking care of each
other’s children while the other worked. Patricia had hoped to set up a
childcare facility but was prevented by a combination of government
bureaucracy and the opening of a temporary facility for the children
of temporeras in the secondary school.

Patricia showed a keen interest in and observation of the changes
that have occurred in the village. For her the most noticeable change
has been the extension of the metalled road into the village making
transport of grape trucks much easier. She has also seen the way the
young people have increased their consumption of alcohol and ‘soft’
drugs. In her opinion though it is very much a problem introduced
into the village by the migrants. But the local women are also involved
in taking drugs and alcohol: ‘The more mature women and the young
women, they all take it, it’s like a vice. So that also came with the
grapes. A type of decline came with the grapes’.

At the same time positive changes have occurred, especially in the
material condition of people’s lives and also in the freedom that
women have to go out to work, gaining independence and increasing
family income:

Well the women here aren’t as feminist as in other countries. You
know, as recently in some countries women can live alone and do
almost anything. It’s not exactly like that here, but the women are

Rural Fruit Workers in the North 131

not totally confined to the house. In spite of everything, the woman
can have her own money and buy her own things. She can decide
what to buy rather than relying on the men to give her money and
tell her what to buy. (Patricia)

For Patricia her work on the grapes represents a possibility for an
income when other work is not available. She has been fortunate in
obtaining regular employment in the government sector, although she
still harbours hopes of setting up her own childcare facility.

For Alicia, Marta and Patricia, the strategies they employ to
manage their domestic responsibilities and wage-earning opportuni-
ties are complex. For all these women the grape economy is just one
waged activity they undertake. Alicia runs the botelleria, Patricia
works in the government office and Marta has had a variety of jobs.
Yet none of these women mentioned having any traditional
responsibilities in small-scale family farming. While the parents of
these women (or in the case of Alicia, her husband), had originally
earned their living from small-scale tomato production, it appears not
to be an option that is now considered by the women. This contrasts
dramatically with the opinions expressed by Rachel, Ximena and
Maria, who view traditional small-scale production as the central
aspect of their income-generating activity and the grapes as an addi-
tional opportunity to earn their own money. In Tome Alto the women
still regard themselves as campesinas first and foremost, and their role
as temporeras as being of secondary importance. This contrast
between the women from the two villages highlights the heterogeneity
of the temporeras.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

It is difficult to summarise the situation vis-a-vis employment in the
modern agro-export sector for the populations of the agricultural
communities. It represents both a new possibility for employment in
an area traditionally characterised as having very limited job opportu-
nities. It has also provided rural women with a new wage-earning
potential and the freedom to move beyond the domestic sphere and
traditional agriculture. However it has bought with it dramatically new
systems of labour organisation, especially in areas where agribusiness
dominates, or indeed has marginalised, traditional production and
labour systems.

132 Women and Agribusiness

The contradictions inherent in seasonal work in the agricultural
sector of the Guatulame are experienced by both women and men.
The very limited duration of much of the work in the grape economy
means that it offers few meaningful opportunities for personal
advancement. The work is arduous, repetitive and poorly paid; it is
also the only alternative source of income outside small-scale tradi-
tional agriculture. The women, especially those working in the packing
plants, have the burden of the double day and extremely long working
hours. On the other hand, the work provides income during periods of
severe work scarcity in traditional agriculture. For many women it is
the first opportunity they have had to earn substantial amounts of
money and have it paid directly to them. It also allows them to escape
the routine drudgery of the home. To this extent it has the potential
for empowering women through increasing their independence, if only
for a short period each year.

In both Tome Alto and Chanaral Alto the changes brought by the
grape economy have been evident in the social life and organisation
of the villages. The alterations in land tenure and labour organisa-
tion have had ramifications that cut deep into the social fabric of
the traditional agricultural communities. While in one village small-
scale production has continued with only superficial changes, the
other has experienced the development of an active land market
and many small-scale producers have disposed of their land and
become more reliant on waged labour. In both villages there has
been a fundamental reworking of labour market organisation with
large numbers of both women and men being incorporated into the
export grape economy as either permanent or temporary waged
workers. With the importance of female labour to the successful
production of high quality products, women have been leaving
the domestic sphere and family farm to undertake predominantly
seasonal paid work.

This has had ramifications for the organisation of household pro-
duction and reproduction, frequently physically removing women
from the location of much of their regular responsibilities, especially
domestic work and childcare. While the women may be preoccupied
with the problems of neglecting their children and work an extended
double day, it also accustoms men to female family members working
and may sometimes spur them to take up some of the slack by helping
out in the household. The composition of the household and the level
of household income are important factors in determining women’s
labour force participation. However, it is apparent that these factors

Rural Fruit Workers in the North 133

are closely intertwined with the cultural perceptions of gender roles
and how both partners interpret these.

The heterogeneity of the temporeras is underlined in this case study
by the combining of traditional and modern, both in terms of income
generation as campesinas and household responsibilities. This reflects
the uneven and partial integration of modern agribusiness into this
region of rural Chile, providing an example of the way production for
the domestic market is interwoven with export activities. The season-
ality of output and variations between the peaks of output of different
produce facilitate the multiple roles of women combining different
types of agricultural work and their domestic responsibilities. However,
women are caught at the interface between the traditional and
modern, and at the interface between production on the land and the
industrial process of the preparation of fruit for export. This has con-
tradictory effects on the women themselves as they juggle their multi-
ple roles and identities. At one level the burdens on them are
increased, but at another there is an element of empowerment as their
ability to generate independent income is enhanced. How individual
women mediate these contradictions depends to a large extent on
their personal circumstance. However, changes in gender and social
relations through the extension of agribusiness have been only partial,
perpetuating traditional aspects of the subordination of women in
ways that facilitate their permanent availability as a seasonal work-
force when required by the agro-export sector.

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Engendering the New Enclosures: Development,
Involuntary Resettlement and the Struggles for Social
Reproduction in Coastal Tanzania

Youjin Brigitte Chung

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’ to
arrive at a richer understanding of the gendered processes and outcome

s

of contemporary large-scale land acquisitions, or the ‘new enclosures’. It
focuses on the case of a recent land deal for industrial sugarcane production
in the Coast Region of Tanzania and the resultant process of involuntary
resettlement. It critically analyses people’s struggles for land in the face of
imminent displacement, and the gendered ways they experience the erosion
of their pre-existing modes of social reproduction. It argues that enclosure of
rural landscapes does more than immediately strip peasants and pastoralists
of their means of production and turn them into wage labourers. It gradually
uproots them from their socio-ecological knowledges, cultural practices and
historical memories, which are rooted on the land and articulated through
gender. The highly uncertain processes of enclosure and displacement also
force rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood strategies and
intra-household gender relations.

INTRODUCTION

Tanzania is among the top African countries targeted by foreign investors in
the contemporary global land rush (Anseeuw et al., 2012). While obtaining

The research for this article was made possible through the support of various institutions across
Cornell University, Ithaca: the Institute for the Social Sciences (Contested Global Landscapes
Theme Project); the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences–AWARE Initiative (Advanc-
ing Women in Agriculture through Research); the Einaudi Center for International Studies;
the Department of Development Sociology; and the Graduate School. I also acknowledge th

e

generous support of the Social Science Research Council, through the Dissertation Proposal
Development Fellowship and the International Dissertation Research Fellowship. I warmly
thank Wendy Wolford and Phil McMichael for their patience and thoughtful feedback in re-
viewing multiple versions of this article. I am also grateful to Marygold Walsh-Dilley, Ryan
Nehring, Chuck Geisler, Michael Watts and four anonymous reviewers for Development and
Change, who provided constructive comments and encouragement on an earlier version of this
article.

Development and Change 48(1): 98–120. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12288
C© 2017 International Institute of Social Studies.

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 99

precise data on transnational land transfers remains a challenge, it is es-
timated that more than 30 deals amounting to one million hectares have
been announced, negotiated or signed in Tanzania within the last decade
(see Locher and Sulle, 2014). The new wave of enclosures in Tanzania has
not only been accelerated by the convergence of the global food, fuel, fi-
nance and climate crises (Borras et al., 2011; McMichael, 2012), but also
by the state’s committed push to transform agriculture into a ‘modernized,
commercial, highly productive and profitable’ sector (URT, 2013: 9). Since
the launch of the Kilimo Kwanza (Agriculture First) initiative in 2009, the
Tanzanian government has placed the private sector at the heart of its agricul-
tural transformation agenda. As part of this strategy, it launched the Southern
Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania in 2010 to promote public–private
partnerships (PPPs) as a model for agriculture-led growth and development.
More recently, in 2013, the government announced its ‘Big Results Now’
initiative, with the aim of establishing 25 large-scale commercial farm deals
for paddy rice and sugarcane by 2015/16.1

This article examines, from a feminist perspective, a recent large-scale
land deal for industrial sugarcane production in Bagamoyo District, Coast
Region of Tanzania. The deal was negotiated between the Tanzanian gov-
ernment and Agro EcoEnergy Tanzania Limited (hereinafter referred to as
EcoEnergy), a subsidiary of the Swedish company EcoEnergy Africa AB,
based on a benefit-sharing scheme, known as ‘land for equity’.2 According
to this arrangement, the Tanzanian government agreed to lease 20,373.56
hectares3 of public land to EcoEnergy for 99 years, in exchange for a 25
per cent equity share in the investment (Agro EcoEnergy Tanzania, 2012a).
Despite the fact that the land title was transferred to EcoEnergy in May 2013,
the actual project implementation remains at a standstill at the time of this ar-
ticle’s publication. In this text, I argue that the project has stalled because the
government and the company have been unable to resolve the issue of how to
compensate and remove the approximately 1,400 people who are currently
subsisting on and staking their claims to the land. These individuals, their
families and communities are not just awaiting physical displacement from
their homes and dispossession from their means of production. They are
experiencing gradual dislocation from their socio-ecological knowledges,
cultural practices and historical memories, which are inextricably tied to
the land, and which are often articulated through gender. By considering

1. As of November 2016, however, not one farm deal has been completed, including the one
discussed in this article.

2. ‘Land for equity’ models have been in place in South Africa since the mid-1990s, but they
have largely failed to generate socially equitable outcomes for smallholder farmers and
farmworkers (see Vhugen et al., 2014). Currently, there are no policy, institutional and legal
frameworks governing ‘land for equity’ deals in Tanzania (Interview with a Ministry of
Lands official, 21 October 2015).

3. This is the official figure as stated in the Certificate of Title granted to EcoEnergy, a copy
of which was shared with the author by a Ministry of Lands official (21 October 2015).

100 Youjin Brigitte Chung

involuntary resettlement as a technical issue, the Tanzanian government and
EcoEnergy have inevitably underestimated the strength and the gendered
nature of people’s attachment to the land.

To explain the dispossessions associated with contemporary land deals,
many authors have turned to the Marxist concepts of ‘primitive accumula-
tion’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession (ABD)’ (see Levien, 2012; Moyo
et al., 2012). These concepts are indeed useful for historicizing the current
bout of transnational land deals as an expression of, and as responses to,
the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, and for explaining how displacement and
dispossession are inherent to capitalist development. However, I argue that
they are insufficient for explaining the gendered processes and outcomes
of contemporary land deals, let alone other means through which capital
continues to encroach upon rural landscapes. This is because primitive accu-
mulation and ABD are constrained by their androcentric and capitalocentric
approaches to valuing land and labour, and hence fail to account fully for the
complex gender dynamics and realities of social life on the land for agrarian
households.

The overarching aim of this article is to embed gender, or to correct
the ‘overwhelming gender-blindness’ (Daley, 2011: 14), in the global ‘land
grab’ debate. I start by sketching in broad strokes what I am calling a ‘fem-
inist ontology of land’. Central to this approach is the concept of ‘social
reproduction’. This concept is more explicitly gendered, nuanced and hu-
manistic than the notion of ‘reproduction’, which is laden with the ideas
of primitive accumulation and ABD. Against the dominant ontology that
abstracts land as a commodity and a factor of production, the feminist ontol-
ogy conceptualizes land as a broader site and source of social reproduction.
I argue that social reproduction allows us to see the multiple uses and values
of land and labour that give significance to life for rural women and men.
This highlights the role of gender as a key signifier of power that mediates
peoples’ relationships to and experiences on the land.

Following this discussion, I present the case study of the Bagamoyo
EcoEnergy (BEE) Sugar Project. I highlight the complexity of multiple
and overlapping claims made over the acquired land, as well as various
problems associated with how people and their properties were counted by
government authorities for compensation purposes. I argue that involuntary
resettlement, specifically the ways in which it is planned and governed,
results in the fragmentation of pre-existing modes of social reproduction;
it devalues the polyvalence of land and labour, and glosses over the un-
equal gender relations of power that operate within Tanzanian society. Yet,
the ways in which rural women and men experience and respond to (the
imminence of) displacement are deeply gendered — they are shaped and
constrained by the patriarchal ideologies that are entrenched and reproduced
within households.

The empirical findings presented in this article are based on fieldwork
conducted in August 2013, July and August 2014, and September through

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 101

December 2015. I draw upon in-depth interviews with 54 people from 47
households (24 women, 30 men), and three focus groups involving 34 people
— all of whom are facing involuntary resettlement induced by the BEE Sugar
Project. I also build on data collected from semi-structured and unstructured
interviews with 52 key informants, including village leaders, national and
district level government officials, EcoEnergy executive and consultants,
donor agency staff, local researchers, activists and lawyers working on issues
of land, gender and agricultural development.

TOWARDS A FEMINIST ONTOLOGY

In order to engender our understandings of the new enclosures, we cannot
simply ‘add women and stir’ (Harding, 1995). Engendering is about taking
gender seriously as a relational and analytical category and an ideological
process, which defines what it means to be women and men, female and
male, and feminine and masculine in a given society (Scott, 1988). It is also
about being keenly aware of how gender intersects with class, race, ethnicity,
marital status, sex, age and other identity categories to mediate the relations
of power and inequality. As Joan Scott emphasizes, feminist scholarship is
less about highlighting the important role and deeds of women than exposing
the ‘silent and hidden operations of gender that are nonetheless present and
defining forces in the organization of most societies’ (ibid.: 25). Before
elaborating on the concept of ‘social reproduction’, which lies at the heart of
the feminist ontology, I highlight several limits of primitive accumulation
and ABD for engendering the new enclosures.

Limits of Primitive Accumulation and ABD

Primitive accumulation refers to the violent process through which capital-
ism emerges from pre-capitalist agrarian social formations: the enclosure of
the commons; the expulsion of peasants from their land; and their forcible
transformation into wage labourers (Marx, 1867/1976). Harvey’s (2003)
updated concept of ABD signifies the ongoing nature of primitive accumu-
lation in the contemporary era; it is the central mechanism through which
capitalism reproduces itself over time. Reproduction according to orthodox
Marxism consists of: a) the daily maintenance of the workers’ labour power;
b) the continued extraction of surplus value through the exploitation of the
proletariat by the bourgeoisie; and c) the biological reproduction of human
beings or future labour power. As Marx (1867/1976: 711) puts it, ‘every
social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction’.
This interconnected process, however, is distinctly class based in orthodox
Marxist theory, and has significance insofar as it expands the ‘public’, or the
‘formal’, sphere of the commodified market economy.

102 Youjin Brigitte Chung

However, as Marxist and socialist feminists have long argued, privileging
the ‘public’ sphere and silencing the ‘private’ sphere of the unwaged domes-
ticity has far-reaching consequences. It eclipses the fact that capitalism has
thrived on the co-existence of waged and unwaged labour, and especially the
exploitation of the latter. It also degrades women’s social status to a mere
biological ‘machine for the production of new workers’ (Federici, 2004: 12),
and devalues women’s housework and care work, which are unwaged but
still socially necessary for ensuring the well-being of all people, regardless
of their position vis-à-vis the capitalist labour market (Picchio, 1992). Fur-
thermore, it naturalizes and trivializes patriarchy which predates capitalism
by over five millennia, and conceals the fact that capitalism, as we know it,
depends on patriarchy for its continuity (Connell, 1987).

In addition to their relation to labour, primitive accumulation and ABD
are also limited by their androcentric and capitalocentric approaches to land.
The questions of who has land, who gets land, what they do with it, how and
why cannot be answered without an analysis of the interlocking hierarchies
of class, gender, ethnicity, age, marital status and other forms of inequalities.
However, because primitive accumulation and ABD tend to assume that land
is a commodity, private property or physical resource to be dominated by
people for ‘productive’ use, they pre-empt the exploration of the polyvalence
of land (see Li, 2014; McMichael, 2014; Verma, 2014). By this I mean the
multiple and overlapping ways in which land is accessed, used, controlled
and valued by rural women and men, and how property, inclusive of pri-
vate, public and communal, exists in a complex web of social relationships
and institutions (see Berry, 1989; Ribot and Peluso, 2003). For instance, as
Radcliffe (2013) demonstrates in the case of contemporary Ecuador, indige-
nous women articulate their historical land claims not based on their class
identities per se, but on their ethnicity and gender, while rejecting a stark
division between collective and individual property rights. In another his-
torical example, Federici (2004) highlights how medieval women claimed
the commons as the centre of social life before the European enclosures. She
argues that the commons provided not only the source of material life, but
also a space for women to convene to exchange news, carry out cultural ac-
tivities, and form their own viewpoints autonomously from men. There is a
strong parallel between her idea of gendered commons and what Rocheleau
and Edmunds (1997: 1355) refer to as ‘micro-frontiers’ in contemporary
rural Africa, such as kitchen gardens, bush lands or scattered patches of
uncultivated land. Women exert relatively greater control over these niche
spaces, than they normally would over their family plots (which are often
perceived to be ‘owned’ by their husbands or male elder kin). At the same
time, poor women in particular rely heavily on these gendered spaces to ac-
cess resources, such as fuelwood, wild foods and medicinal plants, to meet
their personal, household and communal responsibilities (ibid.).

My main argument is that land enclosures do more than immediately
strip peasants and pastoralists of their means of production and turn them

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 103

into wage labourers. They gradually displace people from their cultural
practices, socio-ecological knowledges and historical memories, which are
deeply rooted on the land, and which are articulated in gendered ways. These
combined processes of displacement, dispossession and dislocation can be
rapid or they can be slow, they can be visible or they can be invisible. As
Feldman and Geisler (2012: 974) argue, ‘in situ displacement’, or a situa-
tion in which people are displaced in place through the loss of entitlements,
social exclusion and alienation of rights and identities, can be as trauma-
tizing as physical eviction itself. This type of displacement, albeit unseen,
results in the accumulation of human insecurity and, ultimately, the failure
of peoples’ capacity to ‘socially reproduce everyday lives and livelihoods’
(ibid.). However, what does it mean to be socially reproducing? And what
does impaired social reproduction look like?

Bringing the ‘Social’ Back in Reproduction

At the crux of the feminist ontology of land is the concept of ‘social re-
production’, which has been used widely by feminist scholars across the
disciplines. Laslett and Brenner (1989: 382–3) refer to social reproduction
as the ‘activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, responsibilities and
relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis,
and intergenerationally’. Katz (2001: 711) defines it as the ‘fleshy, messy
and the indeterminate stuff of everyday life’, and Picchio (1992: 98) sug-
gests that social reproduction is something that allows ‘people to feel like
human beings in a system that treats them like commodities’. In this article,
I consciously use the concept of social reproduction to distinguish it from,
and to rescue the humanism that is lost in, the orthodox Marxist notion of
‘reproduction’.

Social reproduction occurs at multiple levels (e.g. household, market,
state) and can be associated with various social formations. However, for
the purpose of this article, I focus on the level of the household in agrarian
societies undergoing capitalist transformation. I define social reproduction
as an assemblage of diverse labour processes — both paid and unpaid, ma-
terial and symbolic, individual and communal — which are necessary for
the sustenance and resilience of human life. What is unique about agrarian
households is that their labour processes (i.e. the transformation of their
labour power into labour) occur on, with and through the land. For example,
rural Tanzanians use their land for more than just cultivating crops. They
depend daily on forests and other tree resources (for gathering fuelwood,
timber and medicinal plants); grasses (for thatching and weaving); meadows
and pastures (for grazing livestock); and rivers, ponds and dams (for fetch-
ing water, catching fish and collecting clay and sand for making cooking
utensils). In other words, there is a strong unity between what are often

104 Youjin Brigitte Chung

separated as ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ activities, or ‘public’ and ‘pri-
vate’ spheres, in agrarian societies.

What is important to note here is that, more often than not, it is women
and girls who perform the labour processes constitutive of rural social repro-
duction. The repeated performance of gendered labour processes on a daily
and intergenerational basis has the effect of reifying the dominant identities
of women as mothers, housewives, caregivers and agricultural labourers. In
Tanzania, such ideological construction of womanhood has stemmed from
the historical legacy of slavery and servitude, as well as the patriarchal
norms that are produced and reproduced most intimately within households
(see Bryceson, 1995). Nevertheless, agrarian households are hardly natural,
isomorphic or altruistic units. Rather, they are a ‘battleground over patri-
archy’ (Friedmann, 1986: 192), in which daughters, sons, wives and junior
kin do not automatically acquiesce in the authority of the male ‘head’ of
the household, but constantly bargain, negotiate, resist and/or adapt to un-
equal relations of power (Carney and Watts, 1990; Guyer and Peters, 1987;
Schroeder, 1999).

The definition of social reproduction provided above is intentionally
broader than the approach taken by some contemporary feminist politi-
cal economists, who pit the ‘unpaid care economy’ against the ‘commodity
economy’, and attempt to calculate its monetary value within national in-
come statistics (see Folbre, 2006; Razavi, 2007). While such distinctions
help politicize the ‘invisibility’ of gendered unpaid care work, they still
operate within the public–private dualism that has characterized both main-
stream and Marxist analyses of capitalism. My aim is to move beyond these
rigid boundaries and to demonstrate that production and reproduction are
in fact mutually constituted, and nested within a broader field of social
reproduction.

To recapitulate, social reproduction is analytically important as it lends
the following two key insights for engendering the new enclosures. First,
it allows us to see the multiple uses and values of land and labour, and
how combining the two ensures the sustenance and resilience of life for
agrarian households. Second, it allows us to examine gender as a key signifier
of power and a constitutive element in shaping people’s relationships to
and experiences on the land. Hence, enclosures of rural landscapes will
likely result in the fragmentation of the meanings of land and labour, and
force rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood trajectories and
intra-household gender relations. These are not consequences specific to
the new enclosures per se, but of agrarian capitalism more broadly. For
example, Carney and Watts (1990) and Schroeder (1999) have shown that
commercial agriculture and agroforestry schemes introduced in the 1980s in
rural Gambia have resulted in the intensification of intra-household conflicts
and the renegotiation of conjugal contracts, that is the terms on which claims
on resources (e.g. land, labour, income) are made between husbands and
wives. Such gendered experiences can be reformulated as ‘struggles for

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 105

social reproduction’; while clearly being material processes, struggles over
land and labour are at the same time ‘struggles over socially-constructed
meanings, definitions, and identities’ (Hart, 1991: 95). In the remainder of
the article, I extend the theoretical discussion thus far to the case of the BEE
Sugar Project.

A CASE STUDY: THE BEE SUGAR PROJECT

Acquiring ‘Land for Equity’

The BEE Sugar Project is a PPP between the Tanzanian government and
Agro EcoEnergy Tanzania, which is a subsidiary of the Swedish company
EcoEnergy Africa AB.4 The project site is located in Bagamoyo District in
the Coast Region of Tanzania, approximately 80 km northwest of Dar es
Salaam, about 8 km inland from the Indian Ocean, directly south of Saadani
National Park, and situated within the Wami/Ruvu River Basin, one of nine
river basins draining mainland Tanzania. This vast project, requiring over
half a billion US dollars in total investment cost, is to be financed primarily
by the African Development Bank (AfDB).5 While a Memorandum of Un-
derstanding (MoU) was signed between EcoEnergy and the (then) Ministry
of Planning, Economy and Empowerment in June 2006 to produce ethanol
for export, its current rationale is to produce sugar, electricity and ethanol for
the Tanzanian domestic market, thereby contributing to national economic
development (AfDB, 2012).

In May 2013, EcoEnergy received a certificate of title to a large portion
of an ‘abandoned’ state cattle ranch, known as Razaba (Ranchi ya Zanzibar
Bagamoyo), which operated between the late 1970s and early 1990s. As
per the ‘land for equity’ arrangement, the Tanzanian government granted
EcoEnergy the right to occupy 20,373.56 hectares of general land (a category
of public land), free of encumbrance for 99 years, in exchange for 25 per

4. Agro EcoEnergy Tanzania is owned 93.5 per cent by EcoEnergy Africa AB; 5 per cent by
the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Company, a state-owned parastatal; and 1.5 per cent
by Community Finance Corporation, a private Tanzanian company, for which no public
information is obtainable. EcoEnergy Africa AB is owned by EcoDevelopment in Europe
AB, which is a minority owner of Svensk Etanolkemi AB (SEKAB), one of the largest
producers of ethanol derivatives in Europe (SEKAB, n.d.). Until 2009, Agro EcoEnergy
Tanzania operated under the name of SEKAB Bioenergy Tanzania. See Havnevik et al.
(2011) for the evolution of SEKAB’s operations in Tanzania since 2005.

5. The Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) had guaranteed a bridge loan worth
SEK 120 million (US$ 14 million) to EcoEnergy in February 2014, but withdrew its support
at the end of April 2015 (Interview with Sida official, 26 October 2015). The planned out-
grower scheme associated with the BEE Sugar Project is to be funded by the AfDB and the
International Fund for Agricultural Development.

106 Youjin Brigitte Chung

cent equity ownership in the investment.6 Specifically, it was agreed that
the Tanzanian government would receive a 10 per cent non-dilutable equity
share at the time of financial close with the AfDB, and an additional 15
per cent after 18 years of project operation (Agro EcoEnergy Tanzania,
2012a).7 Despite the official transfer of the land title in 2013, years of
inactivity on the ground since the signing of the MoU have meant that the
land has become an epicentre of illicit property transactions and burgeoning
informal settlements. In November 2011, the District Commissioner’s Office
resorted to erecting a notice board at the entrance of the project site that read:
‘Warning! Do not agree to buy land/farm in this area. This area, which used
to be Razaba . . . is public land, and the government is in the final stages
of transferring the land to the investor, EcoEnergy. Do not be deceived’. In
early 2014, additional notice boards were erected to show the boundaries of
the project area, and site-closure workers and militia police were deployed
to close off the area.

As of this article’s publication, however, there is little project implemen-
tation on the ground. No bulk infrastructure or on-farm development is under
way, such as the construction of haulage roads, bridges, power lines, wa-
ter storage, processing plant and the installation of irrigation systems. The
project’s partners attribute this impasse to the bureaucratic and political ob-
stacles associated with fulfilling the loan conditions set out by the AfDB.
Some of the major conditions include: a) the resolution of various land dis-
putes within the project site; b) the enactment of regulatory reforms to protect
the domestic sugar industry; and c) the provision of various tax incentives for
EcoEnergy.8 I will examine the first issue in the following section, although
not in an exhaustive manner due to reasons of space.9 While the other two
conditions also merit detailed analysis, such analysis falls beyond the scope
of this article. What the text aims to do instead is to show that there is a more
fundamental and theoretical reason for the delay. I argue that the project
is at a standstill because the Tanzanian government and EcoEnergy have
not been able to resolve the issue of how to compensate and remove the
people who are currently occupying and deriving their livelihoods from the
land.

6. All land in Tanzania is ‘public land vested in the President as trustee on behalf of all
citizens’ (URT, 1997: 9). Public land is divided into village land reserved land and general
land (URT, 1999a: section 4).

7. The government’s equity shares are non-dilutable, meaning that its ownership percentage
will not be reduced even if/when other shareholders make additional capital investment in
the project.

8. Interview with two Ministry of Agriculture officials, 8 October 2015 and 16 October 2015;
Interview with an EcoEnergy executive, 30 October 2015.

9. For instance, this article unfortunately omits the boundary dispute between EcoEnergy,
Saadani National Park and the surrounding villages.

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 107

Competing Land Claims

There are five major settlements whose residents are facing involuntary
resettlement induced by the BEE Sugar Project: Bozi, Gama, Makaani,
Kaloleni Biga and Gobole. In addition to these farming communities, there
are other populations, such as pastoralists, charcoal producers, seasonal
fishermen and food traders, who have set up semi-permanent residence
throughout the project site over the past two decades. The exact population
size of the project area is difficult to determine due to the large numbers of
transient groups of people and the lack of census data at sub-village levels.
Triangulating from available sources, about 1,400 people were estimated to
be living and working on the land as of 2014.10 The local populations are
ethnically diverse, representing a wide range of tribes, such as Zaramo, Doe,
Kwere and Zigua — the original peoples of the Swahili coast — as well as
Nyamwezi, Gogo, Sukuma, Nyakyusa, Luguru, Hehe, Bondei, Dengereko,
Kaguru, Fipa, Ha, Nyiramba, Barabaig, among others. It must be noted
that the Coast Region has historically been characterized by high levels of
migration from the interior; Bagamoyo was once the centre and terminus for
the East African ivory and slave trade in the early 19th century.

In terms of livelihoods, farming communities within the BEE project site
intercrop cereals, tubers and legumes, such as maize, paddy rice, cassava,
potatoes, cowpea and pigeon pea. Many households also grow perennial
fruit trees and cash crops, such as banana, mango, coconut, papaya, cashew,
watermelon and sesame. These crops provide important sources of income
for meeting basic needs, such as foodstuffs, household goods, school fees
and health services, as well as for meeting emergent needs. Back gardens
are considered to be autonomous spaces for women, where they grow veg-
etables, such as tomatoes, okra, onions, green peppers, African eggplant,
amaranth, pumpkin/pumpkin leaves and sweet potato leaves. Women use
these vegetables and other ingredients to prepare side dishes (mboga) to
serve with staple grains or to sell at local markets. Few households cultivate
sugarcane; for those who do, it is mostly done on a small scale for domestic
consumption or for occasional sales.

While systems of land tenure vary according to ethnicity, lineage, religion,
as well as land policies at the village level, gender inequality in land inheri-
tance remains a common obstacle for women in rural Bagamoyo. A woman’s
right to land is often determined by her marital status—even in those few
coastal societies that have historically been matrilineal and matrilocal. When
a woman marries a man, or when she is ‘wedded to’ (kuolewa in Kiswahili)
a man, she usually receives usufructuary rights to her husband’s land. Un-
married daughters, divorcees and widows are further disadvantaged from

10. Agro EcoEnergy Tanzania (2012b) and interview with a district land valuer, 31 July 2014.
Fieldwork conducted in 2015, however, showed that the actual number may be close to
3,000.

108 Youjin Brigitte Chung

inheritance, according to both customary practices and Islamic law (Ezer,
2006; Tsikata, 2003). For nomadic pastoralists, the concept of individual
ownership of land is irrelevant, as pasture, grazing land and water dams are
communal property. For the Barabaig, an ethnic minority in Tanzania, but
the dominant pastoralist group within the BEE project site, the experience of
enclosures and evictions is not new. They had already been displaced from
their homelands, the Hanang Plains of Northern Tanzania, in the 1970s due
to a large-scale wheat mechanization project (see Tenga and Kakoti, 1993).
Since then, they have been migrating eastwards in search of grazing land for
their large herds of livestock.

As stated, the land acquired by EcoEnergy was a former cattle ranch, Raz-
aba, established during the state socialist era. When it closed permanently in
1994, its former workers and their families were permitted to live on the land
until the farm would be repurposed for other activities.11 The workers settled
in an area now known as Bozi, situated at the southern end of the BEE project
site. All government officials whom I interviewed at both district and minis-
terial levels referred to Bozi people as ‘invaders’ (wanaovamia/wavamizi),
squatting on government land. Most, if not all, of Bozi residents are aware
of the fact that they are living and working on land that is not legally theirs,
and recognize the precarious nature of their land rights. However, they stake
their claims to the land not by the virtue of statutory ownership of land, but
by the years of labour they have expended, customarily, to clear, occupy and
use the land to socially reproduce their lives and livelihoods. As an elderly
man, who formerly worked as a Razaba watchman, recollects: ‘The former
workers of the ranch started a life here in Bozi. It was a fertile place. I cleared
three acres to grow maize, paddy rice, cassava, mango, orange and cashew
with my wife. But now we are forbidden from growing permanent crops.
We were told that if we plant them, it’s like we are wasting our energy’.12

I will later return to this issue of land use restrictions when I discuss the
process of compensation valuation.

Stretching across the northeastern part of the BEE project site, immediately
past the two remnant dams from the Razaba era, there are two settlements
known as Gama and Makaani. While Gama is officially recognized as an
area within the sub-village of Kitame, which lies northeast of the project
site, Makaani is not registered as a legitimate settlement in any of the public
documents I have surveyed. While the official position of the government
is that the people of Makaani are invaders just like the people of Bozi,
some of its residents insist otherwise. Both claims have some merit, but
are clearly contradictory. When I first visited the project area in August
2013 and returned in July 2014 and November 2015, I was astonished by
the proliferation of people, houses and businesses (e.g. kiosks, fruit stands,
butcher shops, hair salons), none of which had existed before. Some of the

11. Interview with former Razaba farm manager, 24 November 2015.
12. Interview, 28 July 2014.

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 109

‘new’ Makaani residents I interviewed had decided to settle in this area
despite being aware of the planned BEE project, due to the hardship of eking
out a living in urban areas. While some are ardently claiming the land as theirs
through legal action, others are more passive, with a greater willingness to
migrate elsewhere if and when the project becomes operational.

To elaborate on the former, three male elders from Makaani, allegedly
representing 537 others from the area, filed a court case against the
government and EcoEnergy in August 2012 to claim their historical rights
to the land. Two of the plaintiffs, whom I interviewed, vehemently asserted
that: a) Makaani people are not invaders or trespassers of government land;
b) Gama and Makaani are considered one community, ‘Gama-Makaani’,
because many Gama residents have shifted to Makaani over the years due to
recurrent floods; and c) the formal border of Razaba never exceeded beyond
the two dams that marked the southern boundary of ‘Gama-Makaani’.13

According to the former Razaba manager, Wami River was officially the
northern boundary of the ranch. Yet, since the ranch failed to utilize fully
the northern portion of the land, farmers were allowed to carry on living
there as usual.14

The villagers are divided. While the Makaani elders have some supporters
within their community, outside Makaani — even in Gama — it is rumoured
that the elders are fabricating historical evidence to support their lawsuit.
Some people believe that the majority of the 537 people who backed the
court case are in fact urban elites who illegally bought land in the project area
from the Makaani elders. As for EcoEnergy, the company believes that the
Makaani elders were financially supported by domestic sugar importers, who
stand to lose from the development of the national sugar industry.15 Whatever
the truth may be, the Tanzanian High Court ruled in mid-November 2015 that
the Razaba land, which was transferred to EcoEnergy, was inarguably gen-
eral land, and that ‘Gama-Makaani’ residents did not have any claims to it.

Finally, at the northern border of the project site along the south bank
of the Wami River, there are two sub-villages: Kaloleni Biga and Gobole.
Both are part of Matipwili village, whose land area — as conceived by the
villagers — overlaps with and stretches further north of the BEE project site.
According to the village chairman, the southern border of Matipwili well
extended into the current Gama area during the ujamaa era.16 Whilst most of
the village activities (e.g. politics, schools, social services) take place north
of the river, the southern sub-villages are considered to be the historical
breadbasket of the village, due to the high fertility of the floodplain soil.
Just like the elders of Makaani, Matipwili elders argue that Razaba never
utilized the land past the two dams. As one male elder who lived through

13. Interviews, 11 August 2014 and 28 November 2015.
14. Interview, 24 November 2015.
15. Interview with an EcoEnergy executive, 30 October 2015.
16. Interview, 15 August 2014.

110 Youjin Brigitte Chung

the opening and the closure of the ranch laments: ‘It is not true that the
government only gave Razaba land to EcoEnergy. They also decided to give
away our [village] land without telling us!’.17 The grievance of Matipwili
villagers further intensified in 2014, when the District Land Office issued a
new village map, which had reassigned village boundaries and essentially
erased Kaloleni Biga and Gobole from existence.

An official at the Ministry of Lands, with whom I spoke about this matter,
stated: ‘The government has fixed the problem of overlapping land claims.
The land was granted to EcoEnergy, so the village borders needed to be
redrawn. You know all land in Tanzania is public land, so there is nothing
wrong with the government doing its job’.18 This statement reflects not only
the dominant ontology of viewing land as an arena of state activity and a
factor of production, but also the ease and authority with which the state
can wield cartographic power over its citizens. More poignantly, however, it
epitomizes one of the key paradoxes of Tanzanian land laws. While so-called
unoccupied and unused village land is automatically considered general land
(URT, 1999a), the reverse does not hold true. That is, if general land has been
left unattended by the state, villagers have no rights over it, even if they have
made substantial investments on the land — both material and symbolic —
for their social reproduction over multiple generations. One official, whom
I interviewed in the Prime Minister’s Office, highlighted this dilemma:

Land is politics. In Tanzania, there is hardly any square metre of land that does not have a
claim over it. Only 10 per cent of all land in Tanzania has been surveyed, mapped and titled.
You may have heard the common statistics that 2 per cent of land in Tanzania is general
land, 28 per cent is reserved land and 70 per cent is village land. But this is data from 20 to
30 years ago! These are the statistics used in our 1995 Land Policy! Because we have not
surveyed and updated these data, you will easily find that within a village, there is general
land and/or even reserved land! . . . We do not have updated information about what general
land is today compared to what it was decades ago. This is especially the case for those state
farms and ranches like Razaba that closed in the 1990s. And because general land forever
remains general land, villagers who have customarily occupied and used the empty land for
years have no legal rights over it.19

The local people I interviewed were aware that all land in the country was
ultimately owned by the state, and that the President had the prerogative
power to expropriate the land on which they lived for investments of ‘pub-
lic interest’ (URT, 1999b: Part III, section 4). Yet, they resisted the purely
statist and productivist notion of land by embodying a much larger vision of
land as their site and source of social reproduction. As I will further demon-
strate below, this disjuncture between different meanings of land becomes
particularly salient during the interstitial stage of imminent involuntary re-
settlement.

17. Interview, 25 July 2014.
18. Interview, 20 August 2014.
19. Interview, 29 October 2015.

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 111

Unsettling Involuntary Resettlement

As a condition attached to loans from international financial institutions
(IFIs), BEE Sugar Project is required to comply with what is known as
‘international best practice’ on involuntary resettlement, in addition to com-
plying with Tanzanian national laws. However, because the land was granted
‘free of encumbrance’ to EcoEnergy according to the ‘land for equity’ ar-
rangement, it was agreed that the Tanzanian government would bear the
resettlement costs in accordance with its national laws. It was also agreed
that where additional compensation funds are required to meet the interna-
tional standards, EcoEnergy would provide the top-ups (Agro EcoEnergy
Tanzania, 2012b).

The international guidelines here refer to the World Bank Operational
Policies/Bank Procedures 4.12 (2001), the International Finance Corpora-
tion (IFC) Performance Standard 5 (IFC, 2012a, 2012b) and the AfDB
Involuntary Resettlement Policy (2003). These so-called ‘social safeguards
policies’ are intended to help planners of development projects to: a) avoid or
minimize involuntary resettlement wherever possible; b) when unavoidable,
conceive and execute resettlement as ‘sustainable development programs’
(World Bank, 2001: 1); and c) consult with and assist displaced persons
to improve, or at least to restore, their livelihoods and living standards. In
Tanzania, there are no direct laws or policies on involuntary resettlement,
apart from legal requirements for ensuring compensation for compulsory
land acquisitions, as stipulated in the National Constitution, the Land Ac-
quisition Act of 1967, the National Land Policy of 1995, the Land Act and
the Village Land Act of 1999 and their respective Regulations of 2001 and
2002.

There are some major discrepancies between what is required by
Tanzanian law versus what is recommended as international best practice.
First, while the latter recommends that compensation be provided for all
populations requiring resettlement regardless of whether or not they have
legal rights to the land they are occupying, the former stipulates otherwise.
Hence, because it is international best practice to provide resettlement assis-
tance to even those considered ‘invaders’ (i.e. people of Bozi and Makaani),
the Tanzanian state has reluctantly agreed to provide what the former Bag-
amoyo District Commissioner called ‘compensation of compassion’ (The
Citizen, 2014). Second, while Tanzanian law requires a one-off payment of
compensation (usually cash, unless the government decides otherwise), it is
considered international best practice to provide people with the option to
choose between cash and in-kind compensation. Notwithstanding the dif-
ferences, I argue that there are two shared assumptions, both of which have
far-reaching consequences for rural social reproduction.

First, involuntary resettlement is assumed to be a problem best solved
through the knowledge of technical ‘experts’. Tanzanian law stipulates that
the assessment of all compensation for displacement induced by compulsory

112 Youjin Brigitte Chung

land acquisitions ‘shall be prepared by qualified valuer . . . and verified
by the Chief Valuer of the Government or his [sic] representative’ (URT,
2001: sections 11–12). The IFIs similarly recommend that the project pro-
ponents use ‘a panel of independent, reputed resettlement experts . . . [to]
help capture international best practice’ (World Bank, 2004: 325). The IFIs
further conceptualize involuntary resettlement as a technical ‘project within
a project’ (Cernea, 2008) such that the solution to the problem created by
development (i.e. forced displacement) is more development! Consider the
following quote from the World Bank (2004: xvii): ‘Implementing resettle-
ment as a development program not only helps the people who are adversely
affected but also promotes easier, less-troubled implementation of develop-
ment projects’. In order for this logic to make sense, however, development
must be cast as a transparent, ethical and power-neutral object, or what
Ferguson (1990) calls an ‘anti-politics machine’. When depoliticized as
such, displacement and dispossession become problems to be fixed by tech-
nical ‘experts’, and no longer intrinsic and abiding features of capitalism.

Second, both the Tanzanian law and international guidelines assume that
the costs of displacement and dispossession can be measured and compen-
sated for in cash or in kind. Tanzanian law states that replacement land for
displaced populations should be of ‘comparable quality, extent and produc-
tive potential to the land lost’ (URT, 2001: section 25). The IFIs similarly
recommend that it should be of ‘equal productive value’ (Agro EcoEnergy
Tanzania, 2012b: 39). For crops, it is considered international best practice
to value them according to their ‘earning capacity’ (ibid.:147); the Tan-
zanian Ministry of Lands, in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture,
also publishes an annual ‘Crop Compensation Schedule’ that lists the market
value for each crop that is considered compensable.20

In the context of the BEE Sugar Project, only cash crops, such as per-
manent fruit trees (e.g. mango, cashew, coconut), were considered worthy
of compensation, since it was assumed that subsistence food crops had no
exchange value and that they would be harvested, consumed or stored before
relocation. It was further assumed that there would be ‘a seamless transi-
tion for the next planting season on the replacement land’ (Agro EcoEnergy
Tanzania, 2012b: 147).

However, decades of research on development-induced displacement and
resettlement tell us that there is hardly ever a ‘seamless’ transition after
forced migration (Colson, 1971; Scutter, 2005). This is because people often
are compensated with smaller plots of land with poorer quality soil compared
to the ones they have been dispossessed from, and because it takes time for
people to experiment with and get accustomed to farming on new land. More
importantly, it is because people lose access to common resources, which
are indispensable, particularly for women, for ensuring food security and

20. Interview with a district land valuer, 31 July 2014.

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 113

overall well-being of their families and communities — that is, for ensuring
the continuity of social reproduction.

Indeed, my in-depth interviews with people living in the BEE project
site revealed a wide variety of common property resources, particularly
indigenous tree species, on which they depend for social reproduction (see
Table 1). In addition to their materiality as sources of food, fuel, fibre,
medicine and building material, some of these resources carry symbolic and
gendered meanings. For instance, mkole, a tree that bears small edible fruits
and has pliant branches, symbolizes female fertility and matriliny for the
Zaramo — one of the original peoples of the Swahili coast (see Swantz,
1995). In Zaramo mythology, female elephants are believed to hide in the
mkole woods during menstruation and gestation, by enclosing the area with
the branches tied together. This timing coincides with the season when the
mkole fruits reach maturity and change colours from white to green to red
to black. This symbolism of mkole is still present in the initiation rites of
pubertal girls to womanhood.

These indigenous resources are not commodities with an exchange value,
and hence, are not compensable under Tanzanian law. Yet, they embody
immeasurable cultural values and knowledges that are passed on intergener-
ationally as an intrinsic part of rural social reproduction. While the IFC states
that the loss of common property resources ‘has been identified as one of the
primary impoverishment risks associated with involuntary resettlement and
requires careful mitigation’ (2012a: 7), how and in what ways they should
be protected and restored is ultimately up to the subjective consideration of
government and third-party resettlement ‘experts’. According to Lassailly-
Jacob (1996), the reason why most involuntary resettlement operations have
failed in Africa is precisely because the so-called resettlement ‘experts’ and
local populations have different visions about what land is and how it is
valued. Whilst the former are fixated on ‘productivity and profitability’, the
latter are more concerned about ‘a wide range of social, cultural and reli-
gious elements, as well as the productive factor’ (ibid.: 196). The problem
is not so much that there are differences in perspectives, but that certain
visions become valorized while others are devalued and delegitimized. As
one widow from Gobole poignantly remarks:

You know, there is a difference between the way you see things and the way I see things.
Poor people like me — we have not been educated, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t know
what is valuable to us on our land. Yet, to those educated people, some things we have on
our land do not seem to have value. Mangos, cashews and bananas — we plant them nearby;
they are easily seen on our farms and in markets in town. But there are trees in the bush and
in the wild, which outsiders cannot see, but we know where they are and still depend on them
for our lives . . . We have been ignored. Our culture has been erased.21

21. Interview, 25 July 2014.

114 Youjin Brigitte Chung

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Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 115

Compensation Valuation

In 2011, EcoEnergy hired an independent consultancy firm to draft the Reset-
tlement Action Plan (RAP) in compliance with the international best practice.
In preparation for the RAP, a census, also known as the People and Property
Count (PPC), was conducted from October to November 2011 to deter-
mine the total number of people that are eligible for compensation, and to
value their land-based assets.22 Because the Tanzanian government assumed
responsibility for providing resettlement costs, the PPC was conducted pri-
marily by government land valuers and surveyors, with the employees of
the consultancy firm participating as observers (Agro EcoEnergy Tanzania,
2012b). Eligibility for compensation was based on the ‘cut-off’ date, the
first day of the PPC, after which no new residents would be allowed and
no additional permanent improvements on the land would be compensated
(ibid.: 65). That is, if people decided to plant new mango trees, or build new
houses after the cut-off date, they would not be provided with additional
compensation beyond what had already been valued.

According to Tanzanian land laws and regulations, each person eligible
for compensation shall be given an official document, called ‘Land Form
69a’. This form specifies that the recipient has the right to have his or her
assets valued, and to claim compensation in accordance with the national
land laws. There is another document, called ‘Valuation Form 1’, which is
used to record key information, such as the date and location of the census,
a sketch map and measurement of houses and other built structures, and
the types, numbers and maturity rates of different crops. While government
authorities are recommended to share copies of these forms upon completion
of the valuation process, not all households I interviewed possessed them.
Even if they had the forms, they were unclear of what purpose they served.
In early 2014, another PPC was conducted to take account of the households
that were not included in the first survey. This second PPC, however, was also
fraught with inconsistencies. For example, government authorities counted
and gave forms to the people who were deemed ineligible for compensation,
such as those who opportunistically moved into the project site after the
‘cut-off’ date, while bypassing the eligible ones.

Regardless of these irregularities, there was one consistency: the forms
only included the names of male heads of the households (unless the house-
holds were female-headed), because it was assumed that husbands and fa-
thers were the de facto owners of the land, and that they were the ones that
would collect compensation payments on behalf of their families. When
wives were interviewed separately from their husbands, they noted that it
was ‘not unusual’ (kama kawaida in Kiswahili) for the PPC teams to have

22. In most cases, only unexhausted improvements were valued, such as permanent dwellings
and perennial crops; people’s land itself was not valued, since it was assumed that everyone
was squatting on government land.

116 Youjin Brigitte Chung

interacted mainly with men. They noted this was because their husbands,
and men in general, were the ‘clever ones’ (wajanja) with more ‘authority
and ability’ (nguvu na uwezo) than/over women. Even though they saw this
as common practice, they cautiously admitted, upon further probing, that
they were apprehensive about what was happening. They knew that their
husbands would ultimately be the ones collecting and controlling the cash
compensation, and they feared that it would be misappropriated. Nearly all
women interviewed speculated that their husbands would use the money
and/or run away with it to pay bridewealth for younger and more beauti-
ful women, while leaving them and their children destitute. In particular,
women of the Barabaig tribe (for whom polygyny is actively encouraged)
noted that some men have already taken on more wives or mistresses, using
the prospect of cash compensation as credit. They talked about the emotional
stress they felt when forced to accept new wives into the household, and the
fact that they cannot but keep quiet about their grievances for the fear of
being beaten by their husbands.

Some women believed that perhaps their husbands were strategically
trying to increase their household size with the hopes of getting a bigger
house as part of in-kind compensation. However, husbands were not the
only ones who tried to take advantage of the prospective compensation and
the vulnerable social position of women. For instance, some widows were
threatened by their deceased husbands’ male relatives to take cash rather
than in-kind compensation. They claimed that the land (and the cash that
would eventually flow from it) belonged to the husband’s family according
to their interpretation of customary and Islamic law. All in all, what were
considered strategic moves by men were experienced as torment for women.

Overall, the uncertainty surrounding involuntary resettlement and com-
pensation has been a major stranglehold on the continuity of social repro-
duction for many households. Living in limbo — waiting for something,
anything, to happen — has been psychologically and emotionally debilitat-
ing for people whose lives and livelihoods are dependent on the land. Many
women and men referred to how they were tired of being treated like chil-
dren (watoto), herd animals (wanyama), or imbeciles (wapumbavu), who
were unable to take control of their lives. Consider the following quotes,
which suggest the extent to which peoples’ ability to socially reproduce
themselves has been impaired — even when, on the face of it, nothing
seems to be happening with the project on the ground:

I would like to grow and sell permanent crops. The school in Razaba closed. Now my
children and grandchildren are not going to school. I have to send my children away so they
can receive education. But where will I get the money [without income from permanent
crops]? Who will take care of my children? Who will help me? We are troubled . . . We are
just living here without knowing what will come next.23

23. Interview with an elderly widow, Bozi, 28 July 2014.

Engendering the New Enclosures in Tanzania 117

We are being tricked. It is a mind game. We are told that compensation will be paid in three
months. Then they come back just shy of the third month to tell us that we will have to wait
another three months. If they tell us that compensation will be delayed for a year, they know
that farmers will riot . . . Many people are giving up hope in farming. I mean, which farmer
in his/her right mind would want to make an effort to plough and sow cassava, which takes
anywhere from six months to a year to grow, when they are being promised that they will be
resettled in three months’ time?24

CONCLUSION

The case of the BEE Sugar Project demonstrates how similar large-scale
commercial farm deals or agricultural PPPs may take shape in Tanzania
in the future. Given that such endeavours require the enclosure of large
tracts of land, which are often occupied and used by agriculturalists, pas-
toralists and other rural populations, the extent of forced displacements are
bound to become more ubiquitous. Yet, the absence of national policies
and guidelines on involuntary resettlement and the irregularities (including
gender-bias) associated with its current practice, as demonstrated by this
article, pose significant challenges to the continuity and resilience of rural
social reproduction. Social reproduction, as a concept and as a lived experi-
ence, highlights the significance of the multiple uses, values and meanings
of land and labour for agrarian households. At the same time, it highlights
the constitutive role of gender in shaping and defining peoples’ relationships
to and experiences on the land.

Through an examination of the BEE Sugar Project, this article shows how
the new enclosures are bound up with and complicated by competing land
claims, which are gendered in important ways. Specifically, the text argues
that the process of involuntary resettlement, induced by the new enclosures,
results in the fragmentation of pre-existing modes of social reproduction.
In Bagamoyo, this was made possible through the technical ‘expertise’ of
government authorities, who conducted the PPCs not only according to
their subjective evaluations, but also based on capitalocentric and androcen-
tric approaches to valuing land. At stake are the displacement of cultural
practices, socio-ecological knowledges and historical memories, which are
deeply rooted on the land, and which are often articulated through gender.

Lastly, this article demonstrates how the uncertain nature of imminent
displacement, as well as (false) expectations surrounding compensation pay-
ments, are compelling rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood
strategies and intra-household gender relations. Those who live within the
BEE project site across different communities find it extremely difficult
to make long-term investments on the land, in the face of various land
use restrictions and the lack of clear information about the resettlement

24. Interview with a male farmer, Bozi, 28 July 2014.

118 Youjin Brigitte Chung

process. However, the ways in which individual women and men expe-
rience and respond to living in limbo are simultaneously informed yet
constrained by patriarchal ideologies that operate most intimately within
households. This calls for further studies that examine in depth how differ-
ent groups of rural women and men make sense of and resist, the agonizing
predicament of ‘not knowing’, particularly during the liminal period between
land acquisition and project implementation — or between development and
dispossession.

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Youjin Brigitte Chung (ybc6@cornell.edu) is a PhD candidate in Devel-
opment Sociology at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. Her dissertation
examines the contested gender and social dynamics of a large-scale land
deal for agro-industrial development in Bagamoyo District, Coast Region,
Tanzania.