Novel Agrarian Partnership Against Takings: Science-Farmer partnerships to respond to market grabbing along agricultural commodity chains in Tanzania

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

Novel Agrarian Partnership Against Takings co-creates knowledge with Tanzanian farmer-researchers to empower farmers to respond against unfair commodity chains – enabling them to retain sustainable livelihoods and reinvest the profits of their work in rural transformations. The research project identifies through commodity-chain analyses of four boom crops – timber, avocado, black-pepper and cardamom – how market grabbing, through information, permit and price control, extracts agricultural wealth and contributes to food insecurity. This extraction is especially harmful, because low income from boom crops, cultivated for international markets, undermines the farmers’ livelihoods and rural environmental sustainability. The main research question is: How does market grabbing along boom-crop commodity chains cause food insecurity? We contribute to knowledge co-creation and to retheorizing the nexus of land-use change, market grabbing and food insecurity in this boom-crop era by answering this question. We co-create commodity-chain research for market-grabbing analysis during our four-year project – including co-research with farmers, longitudinal statistical correlation, household surveys, qualitative process-tracing interviews and participant observations. We collect participatory videos to foster a plurality of voices and highlight the value of creativity, farmers’ expertise and lived experiences of farmer-researchers (co-researchers). These videos will be used to reflect on the research process and findings as well as communicate them to other farmers, local and national decision makers, and European consumers. We aim to make market grabbing globally visible – through this deep interaction with the society in Tanzania and elsewhere – while empowering farmers to respond against unfair trade relations that cause food insecurity and undermine social and ecological rural livelihoods.