ABSTRACT
Tanzania is famous for its collectivist development concepts, but its core measure was the enforced villagization in the 1970s with the resettlement of millions of scattered rural dwellers. Despite a redistribution of land, those who had owned more before also did so afterwards. Old elites also took control of village administrations and obstructed a collectivization of agricultural work. Aside from soil exhaustion and stagnant yields, villagization’s most important economic consequence was that many small commercial businesses emerged. Most foreign-designed regional development plans failed, and the use of most technical inputs remained low in staple food production, also because foreign powers imposed a full privatization of trade and subsidies were outphased. The southern highlands, seemingly successful new center of the nation’s corn production, also came to have some of the country’s highest rates of malnutrition. Most export crops were in decline while cash crops for regional markets thrived (vegetables). Despite a deep urban and rural social crisis with declining food consumption in the 1980s to 2000s, labor emigration remained insignificant, rural wage labor was rare and large capital accumulation, if any, occurred in urban trade, services and communications with little connection to rural life.
