Video: The Impacts of Large Scale Farming in Tanzania

Land grabbing has become a recurring phenomenon in Africa but the situation in Tanzania is a disaster; from the northern part of the country where about 40,000 of the Maasai tribe were said to have been evicted from their ancestral land to enable the Dubai Royal family to hunt, to the south where the SAGCOT program (Southern Agricultural Corridors of Tanzania) of G8/NEW Alliance has driven thousands of families to penury. In December 2015, the AEFJN Secretariat went on a fact-finding mission to Tanzania. Some of the journeys took as long as 17 hours but it gave the staff good first-hand experience of the disaster of land grabbing in Tanzania. This documentary studies just the tip of the iceberg of land grabbing in Africa.

In Tanzania, the global agricultural agenda is implemented through Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania programme (SAGCOT). SAGCOT covers approximately one third of mainland Tanzania and was seen as part of a broader push for the development of ‘agricultural growth corridors’ across Africa. SAGCOT receives support from the G7 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. The Alliance’s Cooperation Framework provides for support to Tanzania for the demarcation of village land in the SAGCOT region with the aim of identifying land to be allocated to private investors. These large-scale investments in agriculture for food and non-food production purposes have put pressure on local land rights and food systems. This documentary film discusses the human rights issues raised by large-scale land acquisition for plantation agriculture in Tanzania with concrete stories from Ruvuma, Njombe and Iringa. 

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