Pamba Time

Today I realized one of my dreams. I met with several dozen people in Geita District that rely directly or indirectly upon sales of seed cotton. Two members of Copcot Tanzania’s operations team, Charles Theodory and Danstan Mugashe, took me on this tour. Danstan acted as an interpreter with Swahili speakers while Charles drove and also did interpretation for the older people we met that were more comfortable speaking in the Sukuma language.

On our way to see how people were getting on with an embryonic Savings and Credit Cooperative (SACCOS), perhaps ten kilometres from Geita town, I was surprised to see a man lying in the middle of the road at the bottom of a hill. As we slowed to check out the situation several people gathered near him. We learned from a bystander that a bicycle traveling at high speed down the hill had apparently hit him. There was no sign of the bike or the rider. Charles and Danstan surveyed the scene and concluded that we should move along without offering to help. They rationalized this failure to act by noting our proximity to the town. Over the past years people have been ambushed in the forested areas surrounding Geita and they did not want me to experience banditry first-hand.

As we pushed further into the countryside I took note of the incredibly small farm sizes. Most smallholders seemed to be cultivating no more than a hectare. Production on all the farms also appeared to be quite diversified. People were cultivating maize, cassava, legumes, sweet potatoes and in the lower areas, rice. Rows of sisal, a large spiky-looking cash crop, marked the borders between many farms. I saw quite a few pamba (cotton) fields on the higher ground. On each smallholding where cotton was grown, pamba fields seemed to account for anywhere between ¼ to ¾ of cultivated land.

As we headed towards a ridge, off to the left under the glaring sun I glimpsed a team of five younger men swinging their jembes (hoes) in unison. They were working together to weed their cotton fields. As Charles, Danstan and I approached the men dropped their hoes and came to greet us. None had shoes and all were quite thin. The man whose field we were standing in was no more than five feet tall. He told us that he was in his early twenties, and that he and his friends had wives and children to feed, save for the youngest man who was not yet lucky enough to have a wife. He hoped that they were going to have a better harvest this season than they had during the drought last year. Members of the group complained about the expense of pesticides and their inability to pay for fertilizers that would increase their yields. When I asked if any other people had come to offer advice about production they told me that we were the first to appear their fields in 2007.

I then sought permission from the group to take a picture. They agreed. With my back to the sun I captured several stunning images. As I snapped these photos I noticed for the first time that one of the men was wearing a second-hand t-shirt with the word “Gettysburg” written on the front in bold. The irony was simply overwhelming. Here was a man working with a hoe in East Africa in 2007. The prices he will receive for his seed cotton at the market will be lower again this year due to the global glut that partly results from the United States' cotton subsidy scheme. Interestingly, the US government defeated the slave-owning cotton plantation owners at Gettysburg nearly 150 years ago. Now the US cotton support policy is one of the factors that keep this man looking like a slave of old: scrawny, wearing ragged clothing and swinging a hoe. The imposition of free market policies on Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s, often at the behest of the United States, crushed the domestic textile and clothing industries in this region and led to East Africa’s reliance on second-hand clothing imports. As I stood in an important cotton-producing zone watching men dressed in used garments from abroad sweat it out, I found myself questioning the rationality of the current model. I wondered why many policymakers the world-over would consider the argument that textiles and clothing should be produced where cotton is grown to be too idealistic or even irrational. Certainly it is economically rational for cotton producers to purchase used clothing right now. It is also their only option, and an option that condemns Tanzania to a low value-added future. It really struck a foul note to see a man working his tail off clothed in a garment that advertised his oppressor’s tourist destination. As you can tell, seeing ground zero of the global economy was quite a shock, and I’m only just now collecting my thoughts.

I have much more to write about 22 March. I will continue to clean up my diary from that day and publish bits of it here. Right now, I have to move on. I’m sitting in Mwanza and will be heading out to Shinyanga this afternoon. I hope to meet with two of the organic operators in that region over the coming days. More soon!