Risky business: Agricultural diversification and social relations in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania

This dissertation examines diversification in the risk management systems of the Bena people of the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. The question of how social relationships, perceptions of risk, and experience with hazards affect the land-use strategies and management decisions of smallholder farmers is analyzed in relation to the issue of agricultural diversification. Research was carried out over a two-year period, my research site comprising one village in eastern Njombe District, Iringa Region. A sample of 140 households was studied in order to clarify the nature of the relationship between environmental hazards, land-based labor-based diversification strategies, and social relations.;I present my data on the Bena and their agricultural system: the farming system, the indigenous land classification system, and their hazardous environmental context. My findings suggest the system of land access in this highland environment evolved to handle the hazards encountered from year to year by most households. This system was disrupted partially during the forced "villagization" that occurred in the mid-1970s. Households that were moved-in during "villagization" are shown to have access to lower-quality and less land than those indigenous to the village. However, all groups in the village utilize high levels of diversity in farm management. Those households indigenous to the village, with reliable access to land continue to practice the local land-based approach to risk management, principally the use of physical and temporal scatter of fields and crops. Those households without the social ties needed to acquire adequate, reliable land were found to also manage risk through diversification. However, being more land-constrained but labor-wealthy, they opt for a labor-based approach to diversification. Lacking family ties to indigenous households' land, these households use their labor-wealth to "cultivate" access to land and to diversify their households based on waged work and other labor-intensive income generating activities.