Excerpt from:
NJAA: FOOD SHORTAGES AND FAMINES IN TANZANIA BETWEEN THE WARS, by Gregory H. Maddox
In 1944, the provincial commissioner of the Central Province of Tanganyika reported that a food shortage among the Gogo people had made necessary the importation of large amounts of food for famine relief. The P.C. boasted that despite the dire circumstances, only one death occurred directly as a result of a lack of food. An old man with three children in his care did not have enough money to buy more than one ration a day from the government relief stores. For several weeks he fed his children while he survived on the scraps. When he at last made his plight known to his local Native Authority chief, the district officer ordered that the man be given two rations a day to split among the four members of his household free of charge. Regretfully the P.C. reported "it proved too late and the old man succumbed."
Reports such as the one above were common between 1918 and 1945. Not a year went by without at least one district reporting a food shortage. Although most such shortages remained minor, at times the specter of hunger claimed hundreds of lives. These deaths defy a simple explanation; for despite the unpredictability of Tanzania's rainfall patterns, climate is not sufficient to explain the repeated outbreaks of food shortage.
Indeed, no one factor can be said to have "caused" these food shortages. As many authors have noted, any food shortage entails a breakdown in both production and in supply.For Tanzania, Helge Kjekshus has argued that the colonial system in East Africa caused food shortages by destroying the base of African food production and inhibiting the development of supply mechanisms.4 However, Kjekshus errs in ignoring the variable conditions of agriculture in favor of a broad, over-reductive model. What follows is an attempt to understand food shortages in Tanganyika between the wars as a result of the interaction of Tanzania's diverse climate with colonial policy and world economic conditions. The food shortages that this interaction caused did not end with independence, and a study such as this one can provide useful insights about current food supply problems.
Both geographic location and environment helped determine the relationship of areas in Tanganyika to the world economy and to each other. Although no area exactly mirrored another, the interaction of man and environment does seem to fall into four broad types, each of which had different potentialities for agricultural production: (1) highland areas on the slopes of mountains produced coffee, bananas, and plantains;5 (2) areas on the slopes of the central plateau produced grain, cotton, and groundnuts, often coupled with small scale cattle keeping; (3) the people of the semi-arid central plateau kept large herds of cattle and practiced some agriculture; (4) in a few areas in river valleys and lake shores or sea coasts, people grew large amounts of rice and cotton for export. British policy towards agriculture tended to unify areas of each type, yet colonial policy itself was influenced by environmental conditions in each of the various areas.
Not only did differences exist between areas practicing different types of agriculture, but localities following the same basic agricultural patterns differed from each other by degrees of interaction with the colonial economy at any point in time. Some areas, especially those growing coffee, fit very closely into British concepts of peasant production. Almost entirely self-sufficient in food, they also supplied a dependable and profitable cash crop. In many of the areas growing rain-fed grains and some of the semi-arid cattle areas, however, the growing of cash crops represented an absolute trade-off with food production. In other rain-fed grain zones, the lack of transportation made wage labor, often on estates or mines far away, the only way to earn cash and, although British officials denied it, often came at the expense of food production. In some of the large rice-growing areas and some of the rain-fed grain zones, cash crops either were themselves food crops or complemented the production of food crops; yet the inability to import food because of the underdevelopment of the transportation and marketing systems meant that one bad year could lead to widespread food shortages despite the general wealth of an area.
John Iliffe has tried to describe the colonial economy almost solely in terms of the type of functional differentiation outlined in the preceding paragraph. In his division, one type of area produced goods for export using cheap African labor. Other, more remote areas produced migrant laborers for the export sectors. A third type of region produced foodstuffs to feed the export sectors. While Iliffe's functional division is helpful in understanding the impact of the world economy on agriculture in Tanganyika, he ignores the varying productive possibilities within different areas. It is necessary to look at the four types of areas and the food shortages that occurred within them in the years between the wars…