Ten

Million
Trees
Later
LAND USE CHANGE IN THE WEST USAMBARA MOUNTAINS
THE SOIL EROSION CONTROL AND AGROFORESTRY PROJECT IN LUSHOTO DISTRICT 1981—2000
BY LARS JOHANSSON
 On Trees and CUT A TREE, PLANT TREES
Call us naïve, but when I joined the SECAP team in 1986 as a volunteer, we AGROFORESTRY

Visible Change all believed in tree planting. The offices, cars and teahouses were littered
with ugly stickers reading Kata Mti Panda Miti – cut a tree and plant trees.
Planting trees on cropland had just been re-invented, and we learned about
agroforestry trees, miracle trees and multipurpose trees.
“Agroforestry is a col-
lective name for land-
use systems and tech-
nologies where woody
perennials (trees,
shrubs, palms, bam-
Our enthusiasm spread to the farmers. Within a few years most villages
The case of Kibaoni-Longoi village 1986 – 2000 and primary schools in the district had their own tree nurseries. Between
boos, etc.) are deliber-
ately used on the same
land management unit
1987 and 1999 Lushoto farmers planted about ten million tree, most of as agricultural crops
them in 1987 to 1991. and/or animals, either
in some form of spatial
Cows and goats ate thousands of these trees in their first year. Others died arrangement or tempo-
from drought, perished in fires or floods, or were destroyed by people con- ral sequence”

testing the land claims that are created by planting trees. Many of the surviv- International Council
ing trees have been harvested by now, and consumed or sold as timber, poles for Research on
Agro-forestry, ICRAF.
and fuelwood. But, millions of the planted trees stand there still in the land-
scape. Now that they have grown up one can see where they were planted.
They are everywhere.
They grow scattered on people’s fields and along footpaths, along terrace
risers and farm boundaries. They shade houses and cattle-sheds. Thousands
of them rise over the shrubby weeds on the ridges of Mount Chambogo,
which surrounds the Longoi valley.

MY TREE
I know the story of one of these trees. I didn’t plant it myself, but I decided
where it should grow, and why. Many years later, my friend Juma pointed at
a tall and healthy-looking Grevillea and reminded me:
– That is your tree, he said.

O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 11
 I remembered. It was an early morning fourteen years ago in the long all the time, like Sofia, and her eyes were sparkling. I later learned that many
rains of 1986. I was riding a motorbike on the steep and rocky, but insane- young people used to visit her, just to sit and talk for a while, and in the next
ly beautiful road that the farmers in the Longoi valley had dug out of the couple of years I would become one of them. But on that first day – I remem-
hillside to bring their pears and vegetables to the markets. I was on ber wondering what on earth I was doing there. What could this tree-preach-
one of my first assignments. My task was to supervise the planting of ing project I had come to work for want to teach these people, really?
a communal woodlot on the ridge. Black clouds were towering up We ate the mushroom stew for dinner. Then I got the only bed, while the
over the mountains, and soon a rainstorm would break loose. A pret- family slept on the floor in the other room, with the calf and the chicken.
ty young woman with a big smile stopped me, laughed at my Swahili, Sofia died in Moshi a few years later. Juma’s father, the old forest guard,
pointed to the clouds, and boldly asked for a lift. It turned out that has also passed away since. But at least I was lucky enough to meet his moth-
we were heading to the same place: Mzee Kahema Ngome’s little ham- er again when I finally returned in late 1999. She was sitting on the red
let, where I was to meet the village forest attendant responsible for ground, still talking and laughing with young people, just where I had left
dispatching the tree seedlings from the village tree nursery. her that morning fourteen years ago. Her round house had fallen down, so
The forest attendant was Juma Kahema, co-author of this book. she lived in Juma’s old house instead. Her hair was white. She had become
The girl was his cousin Sofia, one of the countless young women in thin and suffered from a bad cough. But she laughed like a young girl and
rural Tanzania who had given up life in the village to look for some- her eyes sparkled when she recognised me. She assured me that my tree was
thing better in town. Now she was visiting. well looked after. When Juma was away she used to tell anybody looking for
Juma took me to the tree nursery site where I met a couple of fuelwood that he really didn’t want these trees to be cut.
hundred villagers equipped with hoes, baskets and wooden crates for One week after I saw her again she died, 83 years old. Juma says that all
carrying ten thousand potted tree seedlings up the mountain. They those young people, hundreds of them, came to her funeral. They sat around
Late Fatuma Senkhoro,
wanted to get the trees in the ground before the rain started. For reasons in the shade of all the trees we planted, and after four days of mourning life Juma’s mother, 2000
I didn’t understand they had waited for me. Maybe, I thought, it was in Longoi valley could go on again.
Juma, Sofia’s tree important for them that somebody from the project could testify that
and the author
they had indeed raised and planted all these trees. Otherwise there was really
nothing I could contribute. I had not even brought anything to carry in, so with
one seedling in each hand I set off in front of a long line of men and women.
On the way I passed Sofia again. Now she was sitting on the ground by
her mother’s house in a heap of bean pods. I gave her one of my two
seedlings. Mobilising all my Swahili resources until she was almost dying
with laughter, I asked her to plant it right there outside the house, to provide
some shade from the fierce sun in the future. Juma says she planted it where
she sat and watered it until it took root. It stands in a terraced maize field
now, since the house was taken down when her mother too moved to Moshi.
I only managed one trip up to the ridge top carrying the other seedling.
When the rain started I was escorted back to Juma’s mother’s house, while
the others made a few more ascents in the rain until all ten thousand
seedlings were in the ground.
I remember drying myself by the fire in the round, smoke-filled house of
Juma’s mother, sipping sweet tea while she tried to teach me the Pare words
for the mushrooms and forest vegetables she was cooking. She too laughed

12 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e

SECAP poster vision and Longoi valley in the dry season of 2000.
Visible change When you return to a place after many years absence
you look for what has changed. I was overwhelmed by the changes I saw in Longoi in 2000:
• There are trees everywhere: thousands of agroforestry trees and fruit trees on the farm-
land, forest trees in the forest, and even some new woodlots in between.
• The lower half of the slopes and the valley bottoms are completely terraced. Fourteen
years ago there hadn’t been a single terrace in Longoi.
• There is water everywhere, running through a vast system of irrigation channels and dams.
• One walks through tall grass in some places. This means that cows don’t roam around
in the fields and the forest anymore. Instead, they are kept in stalls on a zero-grazing
regime, or grazed in well-defined private pastures above the hamlets. The valley-bottom
pastures and the forest grazing are gone (well, almost gone… some customs die hard)
• A line of tall Eucalyptus trees demarcates the new village forest reserve on the moun-
tain ridge, and mixed forest covers ridges that were bare in 1986.
• Most of the farmland on the upper slopes seems to be abandoned or fallow. They say
it’s because wild bush pigs have returned after the forest was protected, and that they
finish all the crops up there. The villagers suspect that some nature-loving foreigner is
responsible for secretly releasing a male and a female pig in the forest, because they
know for sure that they eradicated this pest in the 1980s.
14 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e
WISH LIST
If the SECAP staff had made a wish list of desired land use changes in the
Longoi valley it would have looked just like this. These changes are precisely
what we were working for. SECAP in Longoi is a success story.
Two things need be said about this before getting on with the story.
First: although the landscape in this valley now looks the way we wanted
to see it, the problems we set out to solve persist, and the agricultural crisis
in Longoi is by no means over. The population continues to grow just as fast
as the land use is intensified, and most people have remained poor and
vulnerable. The numbers of women who seek day labour in the mornings
have grown, and their daily income is still barely enough to feed the family
for that day. The sustainability of agricultural production is being compro-
mised by the use of pesticides and other shortcuts. This year the maize har-
vest failed, as it did the year before. People were living on cabbage and
cooked pears before the potato harvest began.
Second: although we wanted to achieve this kind of land use change with
SECAP, we made such little progress at the time that we were in fact pes-
simistic. We thought deforestation and soil erosion would continue until the
last streams dried out. We doubted that poor farmers could afford the labour
demands of soil conservation and stall-feeding as we advised them. We saw
how better off farmers invested in business instead of farming, how old
farmers refused to reduce their herds, and how women farmers had no say
in the village meetings. We looked at the children in the crowded village
school and asked ourselves where on earth they would farm in year 2000.
We thought that by then this place would be a desert and that people would
migrate to the plains.
There were some farmers who shared these fears. Many moved, with or
without their families, to other parts of Tanzania. We gave a lift to an ex-
Longoi man who had moved down to Handeni in the late 1980s where the
family was allocated a big chunk of virgin land. He had come back to visit rel-
atives. A couple of days later, when he saw how much potato those tiny fields
he had left behind were producing, he started to plan for returning to Longoi.
Those who stayed in Longoi to plant trees and dig terraces were the lucky ones.
They created this new landscape – while we doubted whether they could
change.
O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 15
FOREST HISTORY
Escaped slaves from South Pare founded the Longoi settlement in the 1880s.
One of these was Juma’s great-grandfather, Ngome. As a blacksmith of the
famous Chana clan he was potentially useful to the Sambaa community, so The late Kahema
he was given refuge and a piece of forest land to settle on by chief Kinyashi Ngome, great-grandson
in Mlalo. The settlers were cattle-keepers and paid tribute in livestock to the of the first settler in
Sambaa chief through his representative in Fuizai. Longoi, worked as a
The elders were keen to document the history when SECAP made a small forest guard in the
study of their attitudes to forest protection in Longoi in 1988. To them, it colonial time. He
demonstrates the legitimacy of the present generation’s claims to land and acquired so much land
occupancy in Longoi, which were often challenged in the colonial time and and cattle in the
even after independence. As late as in 1988 farmers sometimes asked if the process that he could
trees they planted with support from SECAP would be the property of the marry four wives in
project or the government in the future. three different villages.
The thick cedar and podo forests surrounding the small Longoi settlement Although he had hun-
were set aside as the Shume forest reserve by the German colonisers. Those dreds of goats he
who lived inside the reserve were forced to work up to three days per week refused to sell even a
in the forest without any other compensation than the right to continue to single one to pay for
graze their cattle. After World War I it took some time for the new govern- his children’s school
ment to seize control and the people in Longoi used the power vacuum to fees. Kahema Ngome
clear forest and expand cultivation higher up in the valley. They started to was also one of the
grow potatoes for the market, which has been the basis of the Longoi econ- pioneers who developed
omy ever since. A few years later they were forced to give up these plots when irrigation in Longoi.
the British resumed forest operations and established a new – second – Arguing that the water
boundary to the forest reserve. But this time at least the settlement area with discharge from the for-
immediately adjacent plots was left outside the reserve. The population grew est was more valuable
and suffered shortage of farmland. Farmers returned to clearing forest again than the cropland that
during World War II when the Government was again busy elsewhere, only could be gained from
to be fined and chased away by the forest guards after the war. Eventually the it, he was the first of
farmers’ complaints that they could no longer feed themselves forced the gov- the old clan leaders to
ernment to cede more land for farming in 1952, by establishing a boundary advocate for complete
to the reserve that left logged forest on the lower slopes of the Chambogo protection of the
ridge outside. Cultivation of perennial crops was prohibited on this land, Chambogo forest in
however, since permanent crops would have entitled the farmers to compen- the 1980s.
sation in case the government later wished to take the land back.
Twelve years later the government of independent Tanzania gave out
13,000 ha of the Shume forest reserve in response to the land shortage in the
District. The forests surrounding Longoi were opened up and people mov-

16 ı Secap Strategies
ing in from Mlalo and South Pare established the settlement along the main
road that now forms the other part of the village Kibaoni-Longoi (Kibaoni
means “by the road-sign”). But most of the forest on the slopes of the
Chambogo ridge was left unallocated by the surveyors, although it was no
longer part of the Shume reserve. From then onwards Longoi farmers, who
felt excluded since they got almost nothing of the 13,000 ha, would from
time to time engage in a kind of race with their neighbours to clear the
remaining forest on the ridge with tacit permission from village leaders and
politicians.
When I first came to Longoi I was puzzled by how villagers worked so
hard to plant forest on one part of the ridge, while clearing of natural forest
continued on another. The village chairman explained that forest clearing
was unavoidable as long as nobody was given authority by the government
to protect and use the indigenous forest. If a farmer refrained from clearing
forest he would lose the benefits of the forest anyway, since someone else
from Longoi or a neighbouring village would clear it. The village could only
protect the parts they planted trees on, not the indigenous forest. But now,
when only 80 ha of natural forest remained on the ridge, the village govern-
ments in all the villages around Chambogo should come together in a plan
to halt forest clearing. They challenged SECAP and the district authorities to
support reforestation and protection of what eventually became a 580 ha
large forest reserve. The main reason was to protect the water sources need-
ed for irrigation.
IRRIGATION
In Longoi irrigation was first developed after a drought in the 1940s known
as the famine of Chang’ola (see page $). Three men – Wangalo Mcharo,
Kahema Ngome and Kichikiro Palula – dug the first irrigation channels in
1947 after having learned the techniques in Mamba in South Pare, where
they had come to trade cattle for food during the famine. The purpose was
simple, Kahema Ngome said in 1988: With irrigation, there would be no
more famine in Longoi as long as the forest streams continued to flow.
This irrigation system was in use only until 1964, however, when farmers
began clearing fertile new plots on the ridge. The return to labour was bet-
ter for opening new fields than with the laborious irrigated farming.
Maintenance of dams and channels was therefore neglected until the next
period of drought came in 1970–74
By then the production from the high-altitude fields had alreadydecreased
18 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e
Irrigation associations In 1988 there were fourteen
irrigation associations in Longoi. Any farmer cultivating an area that could be
reached by the water was entitled to be a member. If there was a need to pass a
channel through the plot the farmer was obliged to join. The members met in June
to remove the silt from the dams and elect a new chairman, mfumwa, for the com-
ing season. New members paid a fee as compensation for the work that had already
been invested by others, and the mfumwa prepared a schedule for when each mem-
ber should get water, considering the location, size and state of preparation of each
plot. Finally, the meeting prescribed rules and fines for theft and misuse of water.
Farmers would open the dam at sunrise and divert the water to the plot for two
or three hours, when the outlet was closed to prevent too great losses to evapora-
tion. For large associations it would take too long to irrigate all plots in sequence,
and then groups that planted at different times were formed. The mfumwa could
decide on immediate changes in the schedule to save a crop. Individual members
were not allowed to charge money against letting someone else use an allocation.
In 2000 there was more water in the systems, but also more competition within
the associations. Whereas the irrigation period had been extended by several months,
the irrigation frequency had decreased to once every two or three weeks, which in
many cases was insufficient. Members high up in the valley complained that too much
water was lost before reaching the most remote plots. Downstream members could not
be excluded, however, since they had contributed on equal terms to constructing the
dams. Members were still not allowed to sell their water allocations.
One farmer told that he got so desperate when he saw his potatoes wilt that he
had paid the fine in advance and openly stolen water for a day, thereby saving a crop
worth ten times the amount of the fine. One downstream farmer described such cases
as signs that the associations were now becoming corrupt. The solution farmers could
think of was to pipe the water, which would make more water available by reducing
evaporation and infiltration.
O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 19
 dramatically because of soil erosion. Many farmers migrated to trade cattle or
to settle in North Kilimanjaro, but those who stayed in Longoi went back to
the old irrigation systems and renovated them in 1972, but now on a larger
scale. The dams and channels were no longer individually owned, but man-
aged by organised irrigation associations in which almost every farmer was a
member. Channels up to two kilometres long had already been dug by 1973.
By the time of our study in 1986, most farmers in Longoi depended on irri-
gation for their livelihood. Their irrigated fields produced most of their cash
crops in rotation with maize. Young farmers were taking over the old clan-
held pastures in the valley bottoms and converting them to irrigated vegetable
fields, forcing their fathers to de-stock. With market liberalisation on the hori-
zon they saw the potential for making lots of money from growing vegetables.
The problem was that the water sources they depended on were drying up as
deforestation proceeded. When large sections of the channel systems had to be
closed down in the 1980s, the members of the irrigation associations had
Carrying tree seedlings
up to the Chambogo
started to demand protection of the remaining forest.
ridge in 1996 That was why they had waited for me that morning on my first visit.
Their tree-planting effort carried the message to SECAP that if we were seri-
ous about supporting forest protection, then let it start in Longoi, because
they had reached a turning point when they really needed the forest back.
CYCLES OF DEFORESTATION AND INTENSIFICATION
Farmers think of change as cyclic like the seasons, rather than linear as in
the straight road to the future evoked by the concept of development. Tired
plots are rejuvenated by fallow periods. In the days of the Sambaa kingdom
periods of conflict, division and drought invariably followed from times of
peace, harmony and good rainfall. As late as the 1980s there was a certain
witchdoctor, Tekelo, who would tour the villages every nine years to identi-
fy witches and destroy all the curses that had accumulated so that everything
could start afresh again.
In Longoi there were cycles of deforestation followed by intensification.
Deforestation was not just a function of a growing population gradually
eating into the forest. Farmers had been opening up new land in the forest
during periods when the government allowed them to or failed to protect
the forest, followed by long periods of agricultural intensification. Intensi-
fication was reversible, because while farmers where clearing new land they
would invest less labour on their old fields. Now the reforestation of
Chambogo showed that deforestation too could be reversible.
A survey of eleven farmers’ production during three years showed that
low yields from the non-irrigated fields in 1985 were compensated by high-
er-than-average yields from the irrigated fields. When the maize crop wilted
on the ridge, farmers did not need to weed it so they invested more labour
on the irrigated fields instead.
Yields from non-irrigated farming were poor. Farmers claimed that the
up-slope fields opened up in 1964 had yielded ten times more shortly after
clearing, but the productivity of these plots had been lost with erosion –
rapidly in the first years after clearing, and then slowly approaching the low-
level equilibrium of 1987.
The same processes had taken place on the lower-slope fields opened up
in the fifties, many of which were in fallow by 1987. Farmers were about to
return to these fields, and put the post-1964 plots in fallow instead, which is
part of the reason why they did not object to planting trees up there.
The irrigated fields were economically more important to the farmers,
although they were smaller, since the return per acre was more than three
times higher.
O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 21
 The potential of irrigated farming seemed even greater when considering
how yields varied from different plots in the sample. The most intensively
managed field yielded a return three times higher than the average. Farmers
assumed that with better management such output would be possible on
other irrigated fields as well. The problem was that farmers reckoned they
were losing about five percent of the irrigated area annually due to decreas-
ing water discharge from the forest. They were convinced that protecting the
forest would halt this trend, and that increased forest cover and larger dams
would make it possible to increase the irrigated area as well as the irrigation
period. If the forest were not protected, they would inevitably be converted
to farmland within a few years. Even if the yields from these new plots
would be high in the first years, they could never compensate for the loss of
irrigation potential in the valley.
Through such reasoning we formulated the optimistic hypothesis in 1988
that forest protection would trigger investments in irrigation, and that inten-
sification of irrigated farming would increase production at a rate that could
match population growth in the period up to 2000. But there were many
uncertain assumptions in this hypothesis.
Would village forest committees really be able to protect the forest, and
would the government let them?

LEGEND
PRODUCTION FROM IRRIGATED
Village boundary
AND NON-IRRIGATED FIELDS
Chambogo forest boundary IN LONGOI VALLEY 1985–1987
Irrigation channel
Road
Irrigation dam
Non-irrigated area
Irrigated area
Land in fallow
Wattle forest 84 NON-IRRIGATED FIELDS
Forest and woodlot Crop (kg/acre) (kg) (Sh)
Map of land use in the Maize 346 30,466 374,728
Longoi valley2000, com- Beans 169 11,230 354,868
paring areas under for- Potatoes 445 24,600 355,470
est, irrigated and non- Cabbage 28 70 1,085
irrigated farming. Plums 64 525 5,250
Total return 1,128,121
Average return per acre: 10,643

59 IRRIGATED FIELDS

Crop (kg/acre) (kg) (Sh)

9488000 9488000 Maize 363 4,273 52,558
Potatoes 2,070 71,250 1,029,563
415000 N 419000 Cabbage 2,564 16,940 262,570
Tomatoes 2,016 3,240 44,550
1 : 30 000 Plums 1,680 2,400 2,400
Total return 1,423,241
0 300 600 900 1200 1500 m
Average return per acre: 35,553

22 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 23
 Would reforestation increase water discharge as farmers assumed, or were
the hydrological changes caused by deforestation irreversible?
Would poor farmers accept the loss of subsistence land on the ridge in the
long run, and would they be able to invest the labour demanded by soil and
water conservation on their remaining plots?
LONGOI IN 2000
In 2000 I could see for myself. The planted trees had grown up. The forest
was protected and belonged to the village. The forest streams had recovered
in a miraculous way. The irrigation systems were in good shape with dam
walls of concrete cement. Farmers had carried out soil and water conserva-
tion measures. The only problem with our hypothesis of intensification
from 1988 was the question about what had happened to those 800 children
of the village school. I think few of those remain in the village today. There
wasn’t enough land for them, after all.
One man summarised what had taken place like this: First, SECAP helped
conserve the forest and within a few years the water came back. Second,
another project, TIP, helped fix the irrigation dams and taught the farmers
about terracing. Third, farmers organised work parties and dug terraces all
over the valley, once they saw that it really paid off. Now they’ve reached a
stage where production is stable, but still not sufficient. There is too little
water again because there are too many farmers. The climate is unpre-
dictable, farming inputs are too expensive, and there is too little farmyard
manure because most of the livestock has been sold.
The forest committee showed a new management plan for the Chambogo
forest drawn up with the District Forest Officer. The plan establishes that
Chambogo is now a village forest, which is a new category of forest reserves
in Tanzania. For the first time in history, villagers’ rights to protect the for-
est and harvest forest products are formally recognised. The forest bound-
aries established in 1987 are still respected, although one eccentric farmer
who had refused to leave his ridge-top home in 1987 was still living there,
still cutting trees and grazing his cattle when nobody could see.
Some of the areas that were planted had been destroyed by fire. The plan-
tations were weeded in strips for the first two years only, which meant that
a thick layer of dry grass and ferns accumulated on the ground before a
closed canopy could develop. Several times in the early 1990s the entire vil-
lage population had been mobilised for days to put out forest fires. They had
failed twice and about half of the planted areas were destroyed. The surviv-
ing trees have performed well, however. The indigenous cedar trees especial-
24 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e
Hadinan Yusuph
tirelessly digging
out new plots.
ly were growing faster than the foresters had assumed. After another thirty
years or so villagers will be able to harvest precious cedar timber. So far the
only trees that have been harvested are the eucalyptuses planted on the
boundary, however, and the forest committee members are reluctant to even
talk about harvesting. As far as they are concerned the purpose of the forest
is to protect the water sources, and commercial use of the forest would risk
compromising this function. Harvesting would easily get out of hand.
The soil conservation concept that SECAP promoted in the 1980s was not
suitable for irrigated plots. In 1988 we had met farmers who were develop-
ing other approaches to soil conservation on their own. Ismael Mndeme
used a system of alternating contour-aligned ridges and buried the mulch
and crop residues in the trenches. He remains one of the more successful
farmers today, selling potatoes and cabbage for almost a million shillings in
a good year. In 1995 he managed to buy more land, a 2-acres irrigated plot
for 400,000 shilling. Hadinan Yusuph was trying to extend a flat but nar-
row piece of the valley bottom by digging bench terraces into the slope. He
was still digging in year 2000, and still hoping to be able to afford a dairy
cow one day. He had been farming in the lowland last year. Several farmers
had planted fodder grass above the irrigation channels in 1988. When clean-
ing out the channels they threw the silt in the grass strip above, which grew
O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 25
higher for each year until level terraces had developed. This is the practice
known as fanya juu from the Kenyan soil conservation programme. These
farmers were the first to build proper terraces in the early 1990s. In 1990 the
Traditional Irrigation Project (TIP), was established in the district with sup-
port from the Dutch organisation SNV. The project offered precisely what
the Longoi farmers needed after protecting the forest – expertise in dam con-
struction and physical soil and water conservation measures. The irrigation
associations were ideally suited for implementing the group-based approach
of TIP, and the soil conservation technologies that were promoted were in
line with what farmers were experimenting with on their own. Juma
Kahema was employed as a village technician and taught how to lay out irri-
gation channels, construct cut-off drains, bench terraces and “fanya juu” ter-
races. Within a few years, Longoi farmers had terraced almost all sloping
land within the areas that could be reached by irrigation water, and enlarged
the two largest water reservoirs to extend the irrigation season.
By 2000, all of the irrigation channels that were closed in 1988 had been
opened up again. Two water sources that had dried up long ago now yield-
ed water again throughout the year, and the dry-season discharge from other
springs had improved so much that the period of irrigation could be extend-
ed by several months. The irrigation frequency has decreased, however. In
1987 farmers got water once or twice per week, whereas in 2000 many plots
got water only once every three weeks. The bench terraces meant that the
water was retained longer, but even so this was too infrequent.
In 1987 there were 2,000 cows, 1,800 sheep and 500 goats roaming
around in Kibaoni Longoi. Only a handful of farmers practised zero grazing
as SECAP envisaged. Now there are few grazing areas left, and free grazing
is prohibited. Some farmers have set aside fallow land on the slopes as pri-
vate grazing reserves, but most of those who still keep cattle have built sim-
ple cowsheds at home and practice cut-and-carry feeding. But most of the
livestock have been sold to buy food in poor years. Farmyard manure, which
used to be free for anybody who could collect it, has become a commodity
sold at high prices in the vegetable-growing season. There has been no new
livestock census, but farmers estimate that the numbers of cows, sheep and
goats have decreased to less than a quarter of what they were in 1987.
We failed to repeat the production survey of 1988, because we could not
find all the farmers again, or they had been away during the drought.
Nevertheless it became clear that their predictions in 1988 about continued
decline in non-irrigated farming had been correct. Many farmers said they
26 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e
had harvested next to nothing from their non-irrigated fields since the El
Niño year of 1997, and a considerable proportion of the land opened up
after 1964 was now in fallow.
The annual outputs from farming varied from 50,000 shilling per house-
hold up to one million for the same year. In a poor year, those with little
resources harvested nothing and others 50–70 percent less. The biggest
households with several wives and more than ten children produced most.
The most productive irrigated plots yielded more than 15 tons of potato
and/or tomato per year. Access to farmyard manure, irrigation water and
labour seemed to be more important for the yield than the size of the hold-
ing, but all of these factors of production were in short supply.
It is fairly easy to estimate how much is marketed from the Longoi valley
in total since everything is transported on the one road that ends in the val-
ley. In 1987 farmers engaged in this trade estimated that 1,600 bags of pota-
toes and cabbage were transported on that road during September and
October. By 2000, the trade had become more sophisticated and the season
longer. Seven middlemen resident in Longoi had agreements with traders
from Dar Es Salaam and bought the vegetables from the farmers before har-
vest. They supply the empty bags and provide the dry ferns used in packag-
ing. Their profit is a 500 Sh commission per bag. The traders load vegeta-
bles every Sunday and Wednesday for marketing in Dar Es Salaam on
Mondays and Thursdays. At the peak of the season they buy 300 bags per
week from Longoi. The big difference is that the season is three times longer
now, because there is more water in the irrigation systems and less crop rota-
tion with locally consumed food crops. These middlemen estimated that they
would send off 10,000 bags of vegetables between July 2000 and the end of
February 2001.
WEALTH AND POVERTY
The production increase in vegetable farming is so impressive that one
would expect that farmers were much better off now than they were in 1987.
But the farmers don’t agree. They say that since they are not harvesting any
maize, most of them buy expensive food for the income. They can’t think of
a single farmer in Longoi who has become what they would call wealthy on
growing vegetables since 1988. The production is still too small to yield a
surplus for investment. The farm-gate value of the estimated 12,000 tons of
potatoes, cabbages and peppers they produce in one season is about 100 mil-
lion shillings, corresponding to a contribution of 66,000 shillings per capita
O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 27
 for the 1,500 people living in the part of the village that is served by this
road. It takes half of this income to buy half a kg of maize per capita and
day. The remaining income is not enough even to pay for the next season’s
CHILDREN IN SCHOOL inputs – manure, farm workers, fertiliser and pesticide – let alone school fees
KIBAONI-LONGOI
and consumer goods. Furthermore, every other year their investments are
4,000
800 lost on at least part of the land due to drought or flooding. The floods of
1997 were followed by drought in 1998 and 1999 and then again by floods
600 3,000
in the short rains of 2000.
In June 2000, the population of Kibaoni Longoi was 3,288 persons accor-
2,000
400 ding to statistics kept in the village office. 62 percent were children under
18 years old. In spite of having such a young population, the annual popula-
1,000
200 tion growth rate since the 1977 census has been only 1.6 percent, which indi-
cates that many people have moved from the village. The population growth
rate of Tanzania as a whole in this period was probably near 3.5 percent.

2000
1977
1987 2000
If the population of Kibaoni Longoi had grown at the same rate it would have
reached 5,000 inhabitants by year 2000. This suggests a net out-migration of POPULATION
KIBAONI-LONGOI
1,700 villagers since 1977, or seventy-four per year on average. Orange: projection
ESTIMATED VEGETABLE Many of the people we met or interviewed in 1988 have indeed moved. of 3.5% growth
EXPORT FROM LONGOI from 1977
Lots of young people, like Sofia, have moved for education or employment,
(Bags of 120 kg)
and sometimes their parents have moved after them, like Sofia’s mother.
10,000 Every farming family we interviewed had teenage children who had moved.
Many adult men work in towns or farm in other parts of the country for SAMPLE OF LAND
8,000 PURCHASE PRICES,
long periods, leaving wives and children to look after the plots in the village. IRRIGATED PLOTS
Others move for good with their families, like the man we gave a lift back.
Size Year of Price/acre
6,000
Most of those who are successful in business or who manage to find other (acres) purchase (Sh)

employment than farming also move, like Juma who is now living in 0.25 98 24,000
4,000 2 73 600
Lushoto with his family. Many of those who move retain their small plots 0.25 76 2,400
in the village and let a relative or friend use them, but there is also a consid- 0.50 88 40.000
2,000 0.25 82 40,000
erable turnover of agricultural land. A semi-random sample of five farmers 1 82 70,000
in 2000 owned 25 plots all together, totalling 21 acres. Of these plots, 9 had 0.50 96 76,000
1 92 80,000
1987 2000 been inherited and 16 purchased for money. The price paid per acre varied 2 95 205,000
tremendously over time, but also for plots bought the same year.

School children Although the population is growing, fewer children go The bottom line is that it is still hard to make a living from farming in
Kibaoni Longoi. The land holdings are too small to be divided among many
to school. In 1987, 46 percent of all children went to school and the schoolteacher who made
heirs, and young people will take any opportunity to move to the towns. The
the census assumed that most of the remaining 54 percent were under school age. In 2000,
farmers managed to achieve the changes in land use that were envisaged by
only 24 percent of all children go to school. These children were harvesting potatoes instead.
SECAP, but the resulting improvements haven’t been enough to sustain a
growing population.

28 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 29

HAMIDA’S RIGHT TO LAND
Hamida is a 44 year old farmer born in the village of Rangwi. She moved to
Longoi in 1974 when she was married to a man from there. Many years
later, her husband sold their land and moved away from the village, leaving
her behind with nine children to look after.
Her situation is not unusual for women in Lushoto villages. A consider-
able proportion of the adult women in Longoi are divorced or widowed, or
left behind by a husband who works somewhere far away or lives with
another family. Often these women have many children and very little land.
Some continue to make a living in the villages where they got married, while
others return to their family of origin.
The women-headed households were an under-represented target group
in extension for many years. The women are poor and always busy, their
30 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e
children don’t go to school, they don’t take part in village committees, and
the male extension officers used to target male household leaders by default.
Hamida’s story, which is one of resilient struggle for development and
change, would not have made it to this book unless her husband’s farm had
been sampled in SECAP’s production survey in 1988.
At that time, the husband was still living with the family. They relied in
particular on one big irrigated field that her husband had inherited from his
father. Their overall output was not high, but at least they grew their own
food and sold enough vegetables to pay for basic necessities and send their
children to school. Three of Hamida’s children are married now. One of
these, a daughter, lives in Longoi, another in Dar Es Salaam, and a married
son lives in Moshi. Two younger sons and one daughter stay with her at
home, and one of these sons is working in a small restaurant in the village.
Two sons, only nine and fourteen years old, ran away from home last year
to look for a way of supporting their mother. They are living together in
Mwanga, in South Pare, where they work as casual labourers.
The three married children all went to school up to standard seven, while
the three sons who are working have not gone to school at all. Her husband
has no contact with her or their children, but members of his family stay in
contact and try to help them occasionally.
After marriage, the family moved to West Kilimanjaro where they got
temporary farmland in the plantation forest. This was a common strategy
for young farmers in Longoi to quickly accumulate a little capital for estab-
lishing a home. After three years they returned home, realising that the land
he had inherited in Longoi was of good potential. They became members in
an irrigation association and took part in developing the irrigated farming in
the early eighties. The family grew, their children went to school and
Hamida thought they were doing reasonably well, until her husband started
to sell their plots in 1988, one after the other. The reason, she says, was that
he took to drink. In 1995 he sold their last plot and moved with their chil-
dren to Mazinde, where he was allocated a piece of extremely steep but vir-
gin land on the escarpment from the village government. He expected to get
a quick return from growing maize and beans. But he and the children suf-
fered badly from malaria, and when two of his friends died Hamida took the
children back to Longoi. Shortly after she convinced her husband’s relatives
to force him to move back too, which she thinks saved his life. As soon as
he recovered he moved to Moshi, however, because without land he had
nothing to do in Longoi anymore. He has not contacted her since, and she
O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 31
does not know what he is doing in Moshi. Maybe, she thinks, he is too em-
barrassed to visit.
This year Hamida cultivates three plots. She has a quarter of an acre of
irrigated but not terraced land around her house; another one quarter of an
acre down in the valley, which she rents for 9,000 Sh per year; and a one acre
plot which was sold by her husband to a man who is now sharing it with
her, after her oldest son managed to pay back half of the money it was sold
for. In 1998 she harvested 7 bags of potato, which sold for a total of 45,000
shillings. In 1999, she could not afford to buy seed and harvested only two
bags of potato, 60 kg maize and 40 kg beans. In October 2000 she had so
far earned 10,000 shillings from selling two bags of cabbage.
Her other sources of income are from retailing baskets and milk. She goes
to the market in Lukozi once every week and buys baskets from women pro-
ducers for 300 Sh per piece, which she can sell in Kibaoni Longoi for up to
900 Sh, walking from house to house. Every morning, she buys milk for 80
Sh per bottle from farmers in the village, which she sells to teashops for 100
Sh. In the best season, February to April, she collects 25–30 bottles per day,
earning 500–600 Sh. In addition, the son who works in the restaurant con-
tributes his salary of 500 Sh per day, the little sons in Mwanga occasionally
send her things like clothes, and her married daughters help her when they
can. Members of her husband’s family also visit her regularly and are ready
to help when she is in need.
In 1999, Hamida participated in organising a group of wakunga wa jadi,
traditional midwives, in the village. The group was formed when they
learned that the district health department offered education to such volun-
teers. Since Hamida has experienced all the problems of giving birth she now
wants to help other women. The midwife group is also a self-help institution.
They have established a fund to which they all contribute, and with that
money they want to start a farming project. When asked about her own
plans, she says she wants very much to have her own cow.
A heifer loan and a farming project together with the other women in the
group, such are her dreams. They are typical for thousands of women in
Lushoto.
WOMEN FARMERS AND THE NEW LAND LAW
Traditionally, a woman moves when she gets married, and therefore most
women farmers are born in other villages than those they reside in. A daugh-
ter does not normally inherit land from her father or mother. Instead her
32 ı O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e
husband allocates land to her, on which she is then expected to feed herself,
him and their children. If a man who has several wives dies, the sons will
inherit the plots used by their mothers as well as a share in the land that the
father had retained for himself.
In the 1988 survey in Longoi, all households differentiated their land
holdings in plots used by the husband, the woman and “together” respec-
tively, the latter category being comprised mainly of near-homestead plots.
Men had retained most of the irrigated valley-bottom fields for their own
use, and allocated most of the rainfed, uphill plots to their wives. Women
were responsible for subsistence farming, and men for commercial farming. 36
A new land law gives equal right of inheritance to daughters from year
TOGETHER
2000. The implications are profound. While most people acknowledge that 32
it is fair and necessary that women too should inherit land in a modern
democracy, they cannot see how the transition from the old system to the 28
new can take place.
What would a daughter married to a man in another village do with a 24
plot she inherits? She cannot cultivate it herself, and she should already have
WOMEN’S
been allocated other land from her husband. She could try to sell the inher- 20
ited land and maybe use the money to buy a cow or another plot in the vil-
lage where she is living as married. But her brothers would resent that, since 16
they may not inherit enough land to be able to marry. They would have to
buy out their sisters, but in Longoi no man of that age has any money. They 12
TOGETHER
could offer cattle instead, but a majority of the families have no cattle today,
and land prices are rising sharply. Either way – and at this point, the hypo- 8
thetical example starts to sound like a bad joke to rural people –- to solve
MEN’S
W.
the equation it seems necessary to assume that the young women they marry 4
MEN’S
will have to bring cattle, land or money to the marriage. This is unthinkable,
because it would be like women marrying men and not the other way
around. Irrigated Non-irr.
MEN’S AND WOMEN’S
Farming has become a business. Men claim ownership to the fertile land FIELDS (ACRES)
while women do most of the poorly paid farm work and remain responsible
for feeding the family. The old system under which women don’t inherit land
cannot be defended under such circumstances. But the transition seems to
assume cultural change and a perfect land market. Otherwise, women’s inher-
itance may in the end result in more land fragmentation and landlessness.
Ms Zongo, an extension officer who was in charge of SECAP’s special
women’s section, shrugs her shoulders and writes the new law off as a desk
product that cannot be implemented.
O n Tr e e s a n V i s i b l e C h a n g e ı 33
 – The struggle for women’s rights to land is about changing the culture
and not the laws, she says, implying that the urban-based women’s-right
lobby in Tanzania has been barking up the wrong tree when pushing this law
as a solution for women farmers.
– I think a project like SECAP must support the process of cultural change Maize stored as
visha in the tradi-
in two ways: through sensitising the men, and empowering the women. We tional way. The
have to pursue both strategies simultaneously. The situation for women maize in the picture
was almost the only
farmers is still desperate and little has happened since I started in SECAP. But one harvested in
there is some change. Men’s attitudes are changing. Women are getting more Kibaoni-Longoi in
2000. It comes from
rights and respect. a field very near the
As an example of what she means by empowerment, she tells about a densest forest. The
farmer says it rains
woman farmer that she knows who got a small loan, started a business, more there because
accumulated some resources, and then got a heifer loan. Now this woman is of the forest.
working in genuine partnership with her husband on their farm. Equality
increased when she controlled some of the resources and income. Projects
that empower women are those that gives women control over land, live-
stock or business. There are many examples of such initiatives nowadays,
and the men are slowly changing attitude as they see women being success-
ful in running the kinds of enterprises that used to be reserved for men.
– The younger generation of men… well some of them, or a few at least,
now see that marriage is about partnership.
She makes a pause, as if trying to recall another example without finding one.
– But it’s a terribly slow process…

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