Summary and Conclusions

Abstract

Aspects and dimensions of food insecurity in Tanzania during the British colonial and post-colonial period under Nyerere’s leadership have been explored in the preceding chapters. In Part II, the physical causes of food insecurity were outlined. Tanzanian peasant producers have faced a highly vagarious physical environment and their household pattern of production has necessarily given primacy to food self-sufficiency. High fertility rates have led to rapid population growth. There is evidence that, in a Boserupian fashion, the peasant household has responded to increasing rural population density with changes in agricultural technology and the intensification of the working day, the latter it appears has been especially borne by women. Food production capability has gradually risen roughly in correspondence with the increase in the rural population, contrary to Malthusian thought. But agricultural adaptations have not succeeded in eliminating the fluctuation of supply due to weather variability, as indicated by the wide spatial and temporal incidence of food inadequacy in peasant households over the past 66 years. It is evident from this that although the level of food production capability in Tanzanian peasant production has supported rapid growth of the rural population it provides an extremely tenuous basis for the territorial supply of food to the non-peasant population.