Trade roots in Tanzania: Evolution of urban

under structural grain markets adjustment

Deborah Fahy Bryceson*

HE IMPACT OF STRUCTURAL adjustment on African economies rever- T berates on the researchers studying those economies. The assumptions underpinning past data collection within African economies as well as the standard assumptions about ‘market economies’ are woefully inadequate when approaching the current array and volatility of grain distribution arrangements now in progress. As a researcher, one enters the field pain- fully aware of how little one actually knows, how little one can realistical- ly assume and pondering how one is ever going to find out what is really happening. For the researcher, the impact of structurd adjustment relates not only to new data findings, but also to new ways of collecting field data, given the appearance of new social and economic processes.

The first two sections of this article give some background on the lead up to and the preliminary outcome of structural adjustment in Tanzania. The third section outlines the research methodology that I employed to study the urban grain markets in 1988, four years after the structural adjustment process was initiated. The last section briefly reviews some of the major findings of the 1988 study, followed by concluding remarks about the implications of structural adjustment on grain market studies in SubSaha- ran Africa generally.

+African Studies Centre, Leidcn, the Netherlands

Copyright by the European Society for Rural Sociology. Sociologirr RUY& 1994. VOI. X X M V , NO. 1, pp. 13-25

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Changing institutional focus under structural adjustment

Fundamentally, both in intention and fact, structural adjustment amounts to a re-ordering of social institutions in the society, with the market tak- ing precedence over the state. In SubSaharan Africa this is a highly signifi- cant development since most countries have hitherto been marked by policies that posited the state as the central organizing agent of social distribution and economic production.

State domination was an especially pronounced feature of Tanzania’s political economy. Government controls on grain marketing were already deeply entrenched under British colonial rule (Bryceson 1993). After inde- pendence, with the state’s ambitious ‘nation-building’ efforts and its choice of a socialist path to development, the role of the state became even more critical in grain marketing. It is, therefore, not surprising that studies of grain distribution in Tanzania have focussed on government or quasi-off i- c ia agencies for over thirty years. Market studies, in the classic sense of demand and supply analysis under free trade conditions, did not exist because the phenomenon itself was essentially undeveloped. From the perspective of the researcher, there are several advantages to

studying the state and its grain distribution activities rather than grain markets per x. State agents are readily recognizable. State policies tend to be clearly enunciated and easily obtained in official documents and other publications. The state itself compiles data in the form of censuses, house hold budget sumeys, controlled price data, production and marketing figures. Thus, research can proceed on the basis of comparing state agents’ actions with stated policies, analysing the impact of policies on both the food producing and consuming public, and using state-provided data cross- checked against the researcher’s own surveys or other more participatory forms of research.

Market studies, on the other hand, are not so straightforward, especially in a period of rapid transition. One of the major stumbling block is that there is a lack of certainty about who is a market agent. Often traders are unwilling to identify themselves and admit their role in the functional hiervchy of the market. This reluctance can be related to entrepreneurs’ usual wariness about liability to taxation, or, as in the case of Tanzania, the possibility of political victimization. In the past, government and/or party agents have been known to wage campaigns against businessmen, labelled walanguzt, profiteers (Maliyamkono and Bagachwa 1990). The outcome of such campaigns for individual traders has in some cases been extremely uncomfortable. Confiscation of s tock and ‘preventive detent- ion’ has been the fate of several thousand during the 1983 ‘anti-economic sabotage’ campaign.

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Even if traders are assertive about their identity and role, they are unlikely to enunciate their policies as definitively 2s state agents, let alone provide their policies or marketing strategies in a written form readily available to a researcher. It is questionable if they even have a clearly worked out strategy, given the difficulty of planning in the extremely volatile supply and demand situation of Tanzanian grain markets. Because individual traders are not keeping welldocumented, accessible accounts of their own trading activities, it naturally follows that there are no aggregate figures of general trading activities. Government attempts at keeping tabs on the grain trade for fiscal purposes or mere record-keeping produces extremely unreliable results.

In summary, researchers like myself, accustomed to studying Tanzania’s statetontrolled grain distribution system, found circumstances in 1988 vastly different from anything witnessed in the preceding thirty years. Quickly one realized ‘adjustment’ was not solely restricted to the recipient grain-producing, trading and consuming population of Tanzania. Research- ers’ methodology had to undergo some fundamental re-ordering. But before detailing what changes I made, it is useful to briefly review the events leading up to the acceptance of the IMF’s stmctural adjustment tenets and how these tenets were implemented in Tanzania between 1984 and 1988 with respect to national grain supply.

Tanzania’s road to market liberaliition of staple foodstuffs

Roughly 60 per cent of food intake by weight consists of starchy staple foodstuffs in the urban areas. The composition of the urban staple food diet is wide-ranging. However, maize and rice dominate when measured by value (58 per cent) or by weight (55 per cent) of total staple foods consumed.’

Rural households, constituting approximately 85 per cent of all house- holds in Tanzania, have in the main practised a policy of staple food self- sufficiency (Bryceson 1990). Thus, it is the country’s minority of urban households who are most involved in staple food marketing issues. Maize and rice are, without exaggeration, the most important mass consumption goods in urban Tanzania by value and in terms of dietary consumption.

The urban supply of maize and secondarily rice has proved to be a logistically difficult and politically sensitive matter Pryceson 1993). Due to climatic variation, Tanzanian harvests fluctuate widely from year to year. The fluctuations of marketed production, however, are amplified and could best be described as ‘wild’ rather than wide. Nationd grain output derives primarily from millions of small-scale peasant farming households who sell only in normal to good years that surplus portion over and

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above their own consumption needs. Thus good harvest yean (for in- stance, 1977/8,1985/861987/88) result in large gluts of marketed produc- tion, while bad harvests (1974/5, 1980/81-1983/84) cause a seizure in the marketed supply.

During the colonial period, long distance grain wholesaling and retail- ing was largely in the hands of Asian traden whose extensive family and communal trading networks stretched the length and breadth of Tan- zania.’ After national independence in 1961, Asian traden were edged out of the grain trade and replaced by African agencies, initially African re- gional co-operatives for produce buying supported by the Dar es Salaam- based National Agricultural Products Board (NAPB), the marketing board for cereals. Later, during the 197Os, the NAPB/co-operatives complex was supplanted by a nationwide, singlethannel marketing system under the aegis of the National Milling Corporation (NMC) parastatal.

Up until 1984, Tanzania was officially fully committed to single chan- nel parastatalcontrolled urban staple food distribution through the NMC. But the NMC had an extremely poor performance record in terms of ensuring adequacy of grain supply to towns throughout the country. Its abysmal financial performance and large contribution to the national deficit prompted the IMF’s insistence on marketing reform during the 1980s. Between 1979 and 1984, the Tanzanian government officially held out against IMF conditionality. In fact, during this period, the Tanzanian government did devalue its currency and adopted various cost-cutting measures, but none in sufficient degree to earn the approval of the IMF.

The NMC, committed to pan-territorial producer pricing by govern- ment decree, was lumbered with the expense of an enormous transport subsidy. It also shouldered a substantial consumer subsidy. The NMC’s growing indebtedness and inability to service national grain supply needs in the face of expanding parallel markets led to the 1984 national ‘budget of appeasement’ to the IMF. This budget included a 26 per cent devalua- tion of the Tanzanian shilling, as well as removal of the maize flour subsi- dy for urban consumen. Further concessions followed, culminating in the signing of an agreement with the IMF in 1986, soon after Nyerere had stepped down from the presidency and Mwinyi came to power. The stage was now set for major revamping of basic staple food marketing, entailing the gradual removal of parastatal NMC control. By the time of the 1988 study, the NMC’s mandate had been whittled down to urban grain mill- ing, wholesaling, and ‘buyer of last resort’ while the quasi-official co-oper- ative marketing system and the ‘open market’ of private traders competed for crops and customers.

Throughout the 198Os, despite official policy to the contrary, parallel markets in grain had expanded. In the more distant past, under British colonial and post-colonial governments, it had sporadically appeared in

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various localities during times of food shortages. But these so-called ‘black markets’ tended to be localized and ephemeral. Their re-birth and growing incidence geographically, began in 1979 during Tanzania’s war with Idi Amin’s Uganda. At that time, the vehicles of the NMC and other crop collecting agencies were confiscated for the war effort. The grain harvest of that year could not be adequately collected. This provided inroads for ‘black market’ agents to begin trading. The growth of black marketing in staple foods thereafter was spatially and temporally uneven, but significant enough for the ‘black market’ to be renamed the ‘parallel market.’ In 1983/84, a serious food shortage in many parts of the country, due to adverse weather, fuelled parallel markets further.

It is interesting to note that municipal governments throughout the country, who were largely in charge of policing parallel markets, varied in the degree of vigilance they exercised. Many up-country municipalities, particularly in areas distant from Dar es Salaam, were forced to be realistic about parallel market operations. The NMC had continuously failed to supply many towns adequately during the preceding decade. Parallel mar- ket traders were actually providing a necessary, but rarely acknowledged, service in these areas.

Assessing agents’ actions and attitudes: Spectrum sampling of traders and consumers

At the time of the study in 1988, the operations of the official marketing system had been researched in great detail, while parallel markets re- mained largely uncharted territory subject to speculative enquiry. The Marketing Development Bureau (MDB) of the Ministry of Agriculture had generated massive amounts of marketing and price data upon which most economic analyses of grain distribution were based. MDB-collected nation- al open market consumer price data has been the only reasonably reliable base for making any assessment of open market performance. During the mid-l980s, economists generally assumed that ‘the parallel market’ was extensive, handling over two-thirds of national marketed production’ and comparatively cost efficient. The assumption that Tanzania’s ‘parallel market’ was ubiquitous did not tally with the fact that conducive condi- tions for its existence did not exist. There was a lack of road maintenance, as well as severe shortages of petrol, a decline in motorized vehicle import and an absence of a well-cntrenched African mercantile tradition. So who were the marketing agents? How had they succeeded in being so all-perva- sive and so cost-efficient in such a short space of time?

The population of traders, both its total number and individual identi- ties, was largely unknown. Furthermore, traders were wary of recogni-

tion, having been subjected to a public campaign to stamp out ‘economic saboteurs.’ To avoid being swayed into a comfortable acceptance of one or another polarized views of the market necessitated digging into the history of marketed grain supply in Tanzania and seeking how people’s opinions about grain marketing were formed.

My 1988 study of Tanzanian urban grain supply, sponsored by the Geneva-based United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), was aimed mainly at gathering qualitative data as a means of sketching a picture of Tanzanian staple food marketing and the govern- ment’s market liberalization policies. I sought to trace the evolution of the market, as well as people’s perception of it and government’s policies towards it. As regards the former, it was logically assumed that due to Tanzania’s poor transport and communications in addition to past govern- ment intervention and Asian trading domination, there was no one staple food market, rather there were many fragmented markets. These markets were likely to be developing at different rates based on variations in agri- cultural production zones, responses to entrepreneurial opportunities, regional transport infrastructure and location of marketed food demand relative to supply areas. On the demand side, variability would be influ- enced by inter-town differences in the volume of NMC-supplied grain, the potential for household self-provisioning and extra-market supplied food- stuffs.

As a reconnaissance exercise, the study was given a regional orientation. In addition to administering questionnaires in Dar es Salaam, four up- country towns were covered. A research team was assembled, consisting of university graduates and post-graduates who originally came from or were currently resident in one of the survey towns.

Given the little so far known about open marketing of food, my survey design aimed at gaining an awareness of the range of variation in the main staple food markets at its different levels of operation, rather than focus- sing on the details of any segment of market activity. Maize and rice trading and consumption were targetted, with collection of data on other major staple foods to the extent that they were combined with maize and rice trading. Survey site selection was on the basis of the surplus or deficit status of the town in relation to maize and rice. Thus, Dar es Salaam, as Tanzania’s largest town and the biggest deficit area for maize and rice, was an obvious choice. The consumer demand of Dar es Salaam had dominat- ed parastatal grain marketing. Mwanza, the second largest town and a deficit maize and surplus rice area, was also relevant in this regard. It was known as an area of sometimes severe urban food shortages. Arusha and Mbeya, intermediate-sized towns in major maize surplus and rice/maize surplus areas respectively, were chosen to provide a contrast. Finally, Songea, a small town in a very large maize surplus area represented the

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opposite extreme to Dar es Salaam, and thereby completed the range of towns by supply/demand type. Hitherto, surplus grain areas had generally been considered from the perspective of the producer. Thus, a survey of urban consumers in surplus areas had the additional value of filling a gap in Tanzanian market studies.

Between thirty and thirty-five traders were interviewed in each u p country town and over sixty Dar es Salaam traders were questioned. Be- cause the total population of traders was unknown, any sophisticated sampling technique was bound to be nothing more than pseudo rigour. h t e a d , heavy reliance was placed on the survey enumerators’ knowledge of their local town and ability to gain good rapport with the traders. The enumerators were asked to cover the various local markets, bus stops and other localities where maize and rice transactions occurred and to get interviews with traders spread over all functional levels of trade, ranging from very small-scale retailers, through mobile intermediaries and large- scale wholesalers. Having obtained research clearance from the municipal authorities, the enumerator usually was officially introduced to the market master at the town’s central market and began sampling there. From there, he traced trade networks along from stationary retailers outwards, trying to get a comprehensive picture of the town’s maize and rice supply system, using his knowledge of the town and contacts to meet various categories of traders. This approach could best be called spectrum sampling based on informed intuition. Used as a form of reconnaissance, it is a low- cost, efficient approach. During analysis, the logical consistency and com- pleteness of its findings are put to the test. Gaps, biases and misinforma- tion in the data become evident when piecing together the mechanics of the local trading network and how it links into wider national conduits of trade.

Sampling for the household survey took a similar approach. The aim of the household survey was to cover a wide spectrum of income levels while minimizing financial and time costs. The survey enumerators not only knew the socio-economic hierarchy of different neighbourhoob in their towns, they also were aware of the new material signs of wealth differentiation resulting from the changing configuration of household income. Enumerators were requested to interview households from all the major neighbourhoob in their towns to obtain wide coverage of income and ethnic diversity, household size variation and female headship. AS long-time residents of the town, they applied their in-depth knowledge of the town’s population to the selection of households. The result was a small household sample with sufficient sociwconomic variation to tenta- tively distinguish different household patterns. Most importantly, at the inter-town level, the findings of the household survey could be juxtaposed

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to the trader survey, revealing relationships between open market food trading and urban household food provisioning strategies.

Data collection in the field was not restricted to questionnaires. All survey enumerators spent four weeks in their survey locality and kept a daily diary that listed their work progress and recorded additional field observations as well as research problems they encountered. The best of these diaries read like detective notebooks, day by day, piecing together the evidence to form a picture of the local trading network and household food strategies. Further contextual data was provided by interviews with officials regarding the nature of the policy, the policy formulation process and the effectiveness of the policy. At regional level, survey enumerators interviewed municipal authorities responsible for local trading bye-laws and representatives of the official food distribution system, namely co- operative officials and key NMC staff. In Dar es Salaam, officials in the Ministry of Agriculture and other ministries were interviewed to get u p dates on policy formulation at the national level. In addition, field obser- vations and findings from interviews were bolstered by a detailed study of historical documentation on marketing, urban population and physical town growth.

Meshing quantitative survey data collection with more unstructured interviews and qualitative field observations made it possible to tackle sensitive issues from a number of different angles and helped generate a wider and more accurate picture of urban grain trading. Information on incomes, prices and profits was gathered in the survey questionnaire and supplemented by qualitative data collection. The inclusion of a household as well as a trader survey provided further crosschecks.

Market findings: Evolving trade networks

The study’s findings confirmed the existence of wide variation in regional grain markets and trading networks. This was clearly seen in the extent of development of a trading hierarchy in each town and the degree of interaction each town’s traders had with Dar es Salaam as the most domi- nant centre of food demand in the country. The following gives a brief review of some of the major findings from the 1988 study. More detailed findings can be found in Bryceson (1993).

In all towns, it was clear that grain trading had emerged as a full-time occupation. Although there was no such thing as an ‘average trader,’ there were some notable characteristics of traders that distinguished them from the rest of the working population. Roughly 60 per cent of the traders interviewed had started trading since 1984, that is, during the implementa- tion of the new market liberalization policies. This suggests that the gov-

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ernment’s market liberalization was, at least in the eyes of the traders, a significant step towards removing barriers to occupational entry. The barrier lifting effect seemed especially important for female traders who were more likely than the men to have started trading since 1984.

Generally the traders were not young. Men averaged thirty-three years of age and women thirty-six years. There was a pronounced tendency for people to start trading in their home areas. Only 30 per cent of the trad- ers interviewed were born in a distant region from where they were cur- rently trading. Related to this, the traders were ethnically diverse in com- position. With survey coverage of five towns, dl the African ethnic groups of those five areas were well represented, In three of the five towns, the demographically dominant tribe of the town had the highest representation of traders in the sample. In the other two towns, it was the tribe of the surrounding rural area, in both cases landscarce areas, which were most numerous in the trader sample.

All the interviewed traders were trading on their own account. One- third were involved in partnerships usually with only one other person, generally a sibling of the same generation. They reported their ultimate aim as traders was to earn a living rather than profit. Almost all felt that grain trading was not a lucrative business. They perceived it as an occupa- tion subject to strong competition in which they were lucky to break even.

The nature of the trading pyramid was very different from town to town and in relation to the two commodities, maize and rice. The retail level afforded easy entry everywhere. The presence of numerous retailers made this the most competitive level of operation. Produce buying, on the other hand, was difficult for another reason. Produce buying in rural grain supply areas and the transport of the grain to urban demand areas was extremely risky. Transport was usually whatever was on hand at the time, often taking the form of ‘by-the-way’ transport arranged privately be- tween a produce buyer and a lorry driver on official business, who none- theless operated on his own account. Produce buyers, as mobile intermedi- aries in the marketing chain, contended with the problem of security. They had to stay with their merchandise en route round the clock to protect it from thieves. Furthermore, they were often obliged to travel with large s u m s of money, which made them vulnerable to hold-ups. In some towns the proximity of the hinterland and easy accessibility of grain to urban consumers either by direct purchase from farmers or growing their own foodstuffs largely precluded specialist produce buyers for the local town, e.g. maize supply in Songea arose from direct farm supply.

It was the wholesale level, or lack of it, which largely defined the char- acter of the trading hierarchy in the various towns. Town demand for purchased grain had to be large for wholesalers to appear. Based on the

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evidence collected from the wholesalers about their buying and selling margins, there was little to suggest that wholesalers were getting super- profits. They were coping with a trading infrastructure that was extremely rudimentary. There was a serious lack of storage and credit facilities which combined with a ‘roller coaster’ demand for grain arising from the wide fluctuations of harvests from year to year. They also faced considerable risks. At the time of the study, there was no indication that grain whole- salers were taking steps toward vertical integration of the trading process by investing in transport. Transport investment, i.e. lorry or even pick-up purchase, appeared to be largely out of the reach of grain wholesalers’ financial resources. Thus up-country transport remained mostly in the hands of Asian and Arab entrepreneurs, as had been the case for decades.

At all levels of the trading hierarchy, competition between traders was tempered by a need for cooperation to overcome the constraints of a seriously inadequate physical infrastructure, notably the lack of transport, storage and market information. Overall, to the extent that a trading hierarchy had appeared, it was a shaky hierarchy with individual positions in the pyramid being viewed largely as a result of luck rather than hard work and sustained effort (van Donge 1992).

There was no indication that traders thought of themselves as a corpo- rate interest group. The political climate and public wariness about traders as potential ‘exploiters’ was not conducive to traders forming political pressure groups (Bryceson 1993, Chapter r). It was apparent that traders’ interests vk-h is the government and party were better served by individ- ual action that combined keeping a low political profile with a willingness to bribe if officials demanded additional payments at road-blocks or for trade licensing.

Was there any real basis for urban consumers’ suspicion of traders’ profiteering at their expense? Looking at the 1988 data, the fears seemed unjustified. Traders were operating within relatively tight margins. While it is impossible to assess nationally, within the regions studied, the open markets gave producers a higher percentage of the final consumer sale price (ranging between 63-93 per cent) compared with the official market- ing system that only offered 53 per cent. With respect to consumers, the retail price for maize was lower in open markets than in the official mar- ket in four out of the five surveyed towns. In the case of rice, this was the case in three out of the five towns.

When comparing open market prices with rainfall and harvested pro- duction estimates between 1983 and 1989, the results show that real grain prices in open markets steadily decreased everywhere except in Mwanza. However, in Mwanza marketed maize output had been in decline over those yean and the decline in supply was greater than the price increase, representing an overall improvement for consumers vis-h-vk harvested

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supply. Thus, for the five towns studied there was no real evidence of over-pricing. The proviso that must be added is that the latter years were considered good harvest years nationally, when grain was in abundance. Future bad harvest years may produce an entirely different piawe.

Despite these tendencies, over-pricing was a common c h q e from the household consumers interviewed. Consumers’ attitudes to gnin traders were primarily determined by the consumers’ alternative food supply possibilities. Those who farmed could afford to have stronger negative attitudes towards traders than those who did not. The incidence of urban farming was correlated with town size. Dar es Sdaam and Mwanza, the two largest towns, with a heavy reliance on market-supplied grain, had the greatest number of respondents with positive attitudes towards traders. Songea, however, presented an anomaly. Songea was the smallest town with the highest proportion of residents farming. Nonetheless, Songea residents were extremely pretnder, one respondent going so far as to label private traders as ‘saviours.’ Interestingly, this attitude had arisen not from the services traders rendered to consumers, but rather their role as produce buyers. A substantial number of Songea urban dwellers relied on the traders to buy their maize when the local marketing cooperative collapsed.

One additional surprise emerged from the household survey findings in relation to the incidence of urban farming. Previous Tanzanian household budget survey data showed that urban households most reliant on direct farm supply of foodstuffs were those at the lower end of the income scale. The 1988 study revealed a new pattern. In most of the towns, the tenden- cy had reversed itself. In Dar es Salaam, Mwanza and, to a lesser extent, Arusha, households with farms had above average incomes. This is related to the premium that existed on accessibility to land in and around the town for farming, as well as means of transport to travel to farm land on the town’s perimeter or beyond. Wealthier households had the clout to get land and were more likely to own transport vehicles.

The victorious or compromised market?

Tanzania has not been alone amongst the numerous agrarian nations of SubSaharan Africa in facing the insistent spurs of IMF and World Bank pressure to liberalize their commodity markets. Virtually all these coun- tries have succumbed to the pressure and officially lifted most of their state controls. The removal of state control in staple food distribution is arguably the most far-reaching form of ‘market liberalization’ in African economies. Undoubtedly this is a historic ‘victory’ of the market over the post-independent state, but is it a victory of the market over non-market

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forces? Can we now confidently proceed with ‘rigourous’ econometric analyses of staple food distribution?

Mackintosh (1990), an economist, has made the distinction between real as opposed to abstract markets. Much of the policy debate on Tanzanian marketing during the 1980s took place in the surrealistic realm of econom- ic assumptions divorced from reality (Bryceson 1992). The 1988 Tanzanian study revealed an embryonic market. The roots of the market, as a nation- al institution, were still being established. If the Tanzanian findings are at all illustrative, there is a pressing need for detailed empirical studies of market evolution under the present transitional situations prevailing in SubSaharan Africa, Eastern Europe and other former socialist-inspired developing countries. However elegant the analytical comtmcts, abstract modelling in these economies produces, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, gross distortions of reality upon which vast amounts of time and effort are expended in the name of ‘development.’ &fore any modelling can be undertaken, market structures, the division of labour within trade and the nature of demand have to be identified (see Hewitt de Alcdntara 1992; Appendeni 1992; van der Laan 1993; Utting 1991,1992). Until these are specified, any study of market operations and efficiency, however technically clever, is virtually meaningless.

One of the difficulties of studying real markets is that an effective methodology for doing so does not fall squarely within any one of the social sciences. Traders, consumers and policy-makers display social and political judgement as well as economic rationality in the marketplace.

At a reconnaissance stage, the importance of interdisciplinary, cross-sec- tional and longitudinal data collection cannot be over-emphasized. An appreciation of the history of trade roots is vital. Such an approach may be methodologically cumbenome, but it does afford an overview of the range and types of behaviour of market actors, as well as facilitating the refinement of analytical themes for future research on grain marketing and elucidating policy issues. An awareness of the spatial dimensions and variability of markets is a natural outcome of an inter-disciplinary a p proach. Tracing market evolution is about the discovery and mapping of markets, rather than the market. An evolutionary perspective provides the basis for considering the necessary conditions for the emergence of a national grain market upon which more standard assumptions of market behaviour can be hazarded.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development for funding my research and wish to thank Cynthia Hewitt & Alcbtua for her intellectual and moral support throughout the project. My deepest thanks go to

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my research team, headed by William Baynit, which indudcd Mwanitu Kagubila, Y.Q. Lawi, Paul M a n 4 Robert Mhamba and Joshua Qorro as survey enumera- tors.

Notes

1. By value, the percentage composition k: make (31 per cent), rice (27 per cent), wheat (18 per cent), milledsorghum (4 per cent), barley and other cereals (2 per cent), bananas/plant&s (8 per cent) and various roots including cassava m d sweet potatoes (10 per cent) (Household Budget Survey 197677).

2. Their trade was chwvcterized by the combination of produce buying and retail- ing of multiple commodities by up-country dukawauahs (shopkeepers). High margins on ‘luxury’ items such as tinned foods compensated for narrow mar- gins on staple foodstuffs.

3. The first estimate of the size of the open market was a guess-estimate Feeler 1983). This figure quickly became f a a and was being cited in Marketing Devel- opment Bureau documents at the time of the 1988 survey.

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