Tanzania's agricultural decline

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Book chapter

Title:	Tanzania's agricultural decline
Author:	Lofchie, M.F.
Book title:	Coping with Africa's Food Crisis
Year:	1988
Pages:	144-168
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Tanzania
Subjects:	agricultural policy agricultural production food production
Abstract:	Since the mid-1970s, Tanzania has become a consistent food importer to meet a persistent food gap. The country provides an almost textbook example of the adverse production effects of inappropriate agricultural policies. For nearly twenty years, Tanzania has overvalued its exchange rate, suppressed real producer prices below the shadow market levels, tolerated costly inefficiencies in its parastatal corporations, and engaged in an industrial strategy that depletes the agricultural sector of capital. Although Tanzania has been buffeted by a series of international economic shocks, the evidence suggests that these policies have been a far greater factor in accounting for the precipitous declines in agricultural production. Although it is uncertain whether the country can reestablish a positive rate of growth without favourable improvements in the international economic system, it seems certain that it will be unable to initiate a process of agricultural recovery without a thoroughgoing reform of its policies toward the agricultural sector. Notes, ref.