Why Tanzania’s Cotton Crop is still Bound up with Poverty

The buying agent loosened the stopper on the scales as Raphael Ngurime’s bulging bag of cotton swung from the hook. The 69-year-old farmer looked on as his second harvest of the season was weighed. He didn’t know what the agent was doing, only that when the dial came to rest he appeared to have lost 50kg of his crop.


When Ngurime had weighed the cotton seed on the village council scales earlier that morning, it had come to 550kg – now it was just 500kg. He says this is common. Being cheated by agents – middlemen who buy farmers’ cotton and sell it on to ginneries, where cotton is processed into lint for export – is one of the many hardships of being a cotton farmer in Tanzania. Continue reading