Sustaining Livelihoods through Organic Agriculture in Tanzania - UMB

In addition to understanding current collaboration, this exercise was deemed
important for identifying potential synergies for collaboration. Key categories of
stakeholder in the Tanzanian organic sector included farmer associations,
cooperatives, government, government institutions, civil society, certification bodies,
companies, and development partners.
Communicating with stakeholders in Tanzania centred on identifying and mobilising
people who were concerned with sustainable agriculture and food security,
particularly those already involved in and responsible for organic agriculture. The
idea was to build a "taskforce" of people who would join forces to analyse the current
system and explore desirable and feasible alternatives.
In order to build the most realistic and useful “rich picture” of the organic system, it
became apparent that the research would need to address multiple scales. The main
levels of analysis chosen were the farm / local level and the national level, with the
aim to bridge the micro and the macro. At the farm or local level, the main concerns
were anticipated to be conversion constraints and certification arrangements, whilst
the national level was expected to focus more on institutional factors and the policy
framework, in addition to ranking bottlenecks in the organic commodity chain. The
research could equally have chosen to consider the dynamics of organic agriculture as
it is being developed at the district, regional or continental levels.
Although the research area was still extremely broad at this stage, gradually system
boundaries were being drawn in terms of setting, actors, events and processes. For
example, the study was confined to sedentary cropping systems (ranging from purely
arable to mixed farming) either practising certified organic production or in the
process of conversion.
A CATWOE checklist was used to define the system in terms of:
Clients – smallholder farmers
Actors – farmers, researchers, government, private sector, civil society and public
Transformation – transition to organic agriculture
World view – sustainable agriculture
Owners – farmers, researchers, government, private sector, civil society and public
Environmental constraints – low investment abilities, underdeveloped markets, poor
infrastructure, unreliable climate, antagonistic worldviews
On this basis a root definition of the relevant human activity system emerged and was
expressed as:
‘Organic food and farming systems under the control of smallholder farmers
and government agents which, in the light of financial, infrastructural, market
and environmental constraints, convert to certified organic production with the
aim of improving system sustainability, food security and self-reliance’.
In addition, expected outputs and indicators were devised. The outputs included
strengthening and facilitating the national umbrella organisation for organic
agriculture, the Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement (TOAM), providing inputs
for an organic policy, participating in knowledge-sharing and advocacy actions.
Realising the weaknesses of the current organic sector led to the realisation that
capacity-building and awareness creation were priority areas for the research to focus
upon.
28