gramme in Tanzania in order to explain why
farmers’ participation is tinged with ambiva-
lence, resentment, and resistance.^5
The Tanzania Forestry Action Plan - North
Pare (hereafter TFAP) was a project fund-
ed and implemented by Germany’s GTZ
agency in the North Pare Mountains of
Mwanga District. The agency worked
throughout the 1990s to reverse a per-
ceived Malthusian crisis^6 through
afforestation, soil and water conservation
technologies, building local land manage-
ment institutions. The strategies for
achieving these objectives included the
formation of Land Use Planning
Committees (hereafter LUPCs) in project
villages and the promotion of terracing.
Understanding why many participants
have, at best, an ambivalent attitude
toward the project requires a political and
cultural analysis of what administrators
often view as technical issues. Such an
anthropological approach can provide con-
servation practitioners a blueprint for
issues to consider, questions to ask, and
assumptions to avoid. By viewing commu-
nities, societies, and cultures as processes
of differentiated economic, socio-political,
and moral contestation (and ambiguity)
rather than consensus-based static
objects, more effective and appropriate
conservation programs may result.
The development dilemmas of ter-
racing
TFAP planners identified soil erosion as
the major environmental problem in North
Pare.^7 Most of the soils in the steep
mountains are moderately fertile and
highly prone to erosion red sandy clay
loams. Except for the rich loam in valley
bottoms, the soil has low to medium lev-
els of the major plant nutrients and is
strongly acidic.^8 Farmers grow coffee,
bananas, beans, maize and sweet pota-
toes, and with a median total farm size of
0.78 hectares (1.9 acres), few can afford
to leave their plots fallow to recover after
several years of cropping.^9To prevent the further loss of topsoil,
TFAP encouraged North Pare farmers to
construct bench and fanya juuterraces^10.
A major problem with both types is that
construction inverts the soil profile by
placing relatively infertile subsoil on top of
more fertile topsoil. This depresses yields
on terraces for several years unless the
farmer applies manure or mulch — both
of which are in short supply in North Pare.
Grass and leguminous cover crops are
therefore necessary to feed livestock and
increase the manure supply. In theory,
increased soil fertility should eventually
compensate farmers for the land area lost
to the grass strips and vertical walls. Most
North Pare farmers, however, focus on
shorter time horizons. As one woman
explained her misgivings in a public meet-
ing:“We don’t want terraces because there is
no profit in it, and it makes lots of extra
work to restore the soil’s fertility, so we
have given up terracing. You can’t ask us
to terrace a big area, because after we do
it, we get no food from that land for sev-Conservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
Figure 1.Un-terraced fields with ‘trash line’ bunds,
June 2004 (Courtesy Michael Sheridan)