Breaking the Historic Relationships in Tanzania

Abstract

Tanzania’s cotton conundrum will not simply be resolved through the reduction and eventual elimination of the manifold protections the US government affords King Cotton. While the economic, ethical, moral and social rationales for a prompt exorcism of this external bogeyman have been articulated and disseminated for years, and trade watchers around the globe continue to back these grounds for policy change (see Stiglitz 2006b), the removal of US subsidies cannot be a silver bullet. Those that uphold the idea that a freer cotton trade will necessarily constitute a quick win for impoverished cotton growers maintain a position that ironically parallels the rigid and determinist stance radical critics of capitalism took during the 1970s. Then, dependency theorists focused narrowly on the ways that imported governance institutions and asymmetrical linkages with the world capitalist economy fostered underdevelopment in peripheral zones such as tropical Africa (Leys 1975). Africanist scholars who underscored the inapplicability of monocausal explanations south of the Sahara later took the unidirectional dependency perspective to task (Berman 1992).