What happens to the land when agricultural investors leave the site? : a dissemination report about the project »Towards Land Equality – a study of how cancelled agro-investments impact smallholders’ land access and livelihoods in rural Tanzania« (2022-2026)

Sammanfattning

This report provides a brief background to large-scale agricultural investments in Africa and Tanzania and overall findings from a research project conducted between 2022–2026 which investigated impacts of such investments in Tanzania that were stalled or cancelled.

When Linda Engström did her PhD (2012–2018), she learned about this trend and tried to understand why so many investments were scaled back or cancelled. Some of the background material in this report are derived from this work. She wanted to explore this further, and after getting her PhD she and Ronald Ndesanjo applied for funding from a Swedish government agency and were successful to get funding for four years for this project about large-scale agro-investments, with a particular focus on cancelled investments, and land access and use after investors leave their investment sites.

The purpose of the project was to understand what happens to the land that is left behind when investors do not start or cancel their operations. We wanted to understand who can access and use the land left by investors, how they use it and why. We also sought to learn from cases where land was redistributed to those who had previously used it or claimed rights to it before its allocation for investment, and/or to immigrants who arrived after the investment was cancelled.

The project covered six investments in five locations in rural Tanzania: RAZABA (Ranchi ya Zanzibar Bagamoyo), in Bagamoyo District, Basanza and Msebei villages and surroundings in Uvinza District, Kisarawe District, and Morogoro Rural and Kilosa Districts. The team has spent more time in Bagamoyo and Uvinza Districts. In the other three locations, shorter studies were performed by master students from Tanzania, Norway, Germany and Sweden.

The structure of the report: The report will start with providing a background about large-scale agro-investments in Africa and Tanzania. Then it will describe the research project and some general findings which apply for all six investments and then key findings from each investment. At the end, we present the research team.

Publicerad i

Utgivare: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; University of Dar es Salaam

SLU författare

• Engström, Linda

  • Institutionen för stad och land, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
    

UKÄ forskningsämne

Jordbruksekonomi och landsbygdsutveckling

Permanent länk till denna sida (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/146832