Most policymakers and development practitioners
typically assume that the great majority of people in rural subSaharan
Africa are self-employed smallholder farmers. This is
certainly the case in Tanzania, where even President Kikwete has
recently described “subsistence agriculture” as the prevailing
economic condition in rural areas in his country (World Bank
2007).
The common view is that labour markets are not really
important. This position appears to be supported, in fact, by
the most recent national Labour Force Survey, which suggested
that only 11% of rural households contain any wage workers
(URoT 2007).
As a result, most government, donor and NGO rural development
programmes focus on supporting smallholder farming, usually
through trying to strengthen farmers’ market position or
improving their access to inputs. Tanzania’s newest national
development strategy, called Kilimo Kwanza or ‘Agriculture
First’, clearly assumes that most rural households rely mainly on
own-account farming for their survival.