ALGORITMOS PROBE/ECHO

I have spent the day around the seven large milling operations on the edge of the village of Ubaruku in Mbarali District about 800 kms from Dar es Salaam. I watched the large machines husking and sorting rice, impressed by the great mounds of chaff piling up all the time behind the mills as the machines ground on. I ate lunch and chatted with some of the traders and wakulima at one of the eating places along the road next to the mills.

Now it is 8 pm and dark outside, I am sitting talking with Mposi in his small office at the mill he owns. The power has gone off so the mill has stopped running, but there are still some builders outside extending Mposi’s warehouse. Mposi explains that the profit margins are so low that if he uses a generator to keep milling the diesel cost will mean he is running at a loss. He also commented that “I have to extend the warehouse or they [traders and wakulima] will go to another mill”.

Mposi dropped out of high school due to a lack of money and then trained as a mechanic and farmed on some of his father’s land in Mfinga Region, where he is from. He bought and fixed up an old tractor for his own farming and then came to Ubaruku in 1992 to provide

ploughing services, after seeing, while visiting a friend, that the rice farmers had limited access to machinery. For years, he drove the tractor himself, “I used to work 24 hours during the ploughing season” he said. Later, working with his brother, he added another tractor and started to grow rice as well. In 1999 he bought his first milling machine. Later he bought bigger machines and built his first warehouse in 2007. Now Mposi has two milling machines on the same site with the capacity to husk 30 tons of rice a day and his warehouses are full with approximately 2,300 tons of rice paddy belonging to many different wakulima and traders.

Mposi still grows rice, mostly on hired land, and carries on the business of hiring out farm machinery. As he put it, “up too now I am here and go forward with the small farmers and the traders, I plough and mill the rice for the small and big farmers”. He sells his own rice paddy to the small traders, who use his machines. He knows he could make a bit more profit selling the husked rice directly, but says “you will lose time, so better to leave it to these small traders, while I continue with other things”. Other things he wants to do include buying bigger machines, building a much bigger warehouse and opening a rice centre in Dar es Salaam. What is holding him back is that he has been unable to get a bank loan, “there is a big problem with the bank, if you are an investor like me it is difficult, they want a person who can pay every month” he complains.

After the interview, I go on my hired bicycle to one of the many bars in Ubaruku, get a drink and food and talk to more people who are all in some way linked to the rice industry. Ubaruku is an important source of rice for Dar es Salaam. There is no structured market space, like at Kibaigwa, but the area around seven large rice milling operations, including Mposi’s, serves the same purpose. This is where wakulima and local traders come to store and husk their rice paddy. It is also where the traders from Dar es Salaam come to buy rice. The local rice traders queue outside the rice mills waiting their turn to use the machines and they meet traders there and in the nearby eating places. The traders spend a lot of time together, share information and collaborate at times, such as when they join together to fill orders. The traders from Dar es Salaam often travel together and stay in the same guest houses.

There is a continuous bustle around the mills; it goes on all night if the electricity is working. There are always trucks organised by the transport dalalis arriving or waiting to collect their loads. These loads almost always made up of rice from a number of different traders. A tax collector sits under a tree keeping an eye on the comings and goings and collecting the tax that makes up a large part of the revenue for the Mbarali District Municipality. Teams of casual workers are kept busy around each mill unloading sacks of rice paddy and then loading sacks of husked rice onto other trucks.

There is no management of the space as a market, as there is in Kibaigwa, nor is there any common pool resource management system. There is, however, an enormous amount of collaboration in the common interest of the actors involved and the same functions that one

finds in Kibaigwa and other more structured markets are continuing in a similar manner. The elements of common pool resource management continue, but in a more organic, symbiotic, way. As with Kibaigwa, the rice trading activities around Ubaruku make a large contribution to the local economy.

Each mill at Ubaruku is owned by a separate business person employing their own team to run the mills and the warehouses that form an integral part of the operation. All the traders, food vendors, dalalis and others are independent operators. A government intervention motivated on health grounds, resulted in the mills being relocated from the centre of the village to one reasonably planned space outside the village. This has created space not just for the mills, but also for the trucks and other related businesses. The roads are gravel, but in reasonable condition which is important for the semis (trucks with trailers able to carry loads of 30-33 tons) coming to collect. The other infrastructure the government put in place was the three-phase electricity supply needed by the large husking and sorting machines. The transport dalali association is one of the important and more structured institutions, with their own office not far from the mills.

The functioning of the actual ‘market’, as a place for the exchange of goods and money, has developed around this core infrastructure with the mills at the centre. Traders and wakulima are naturally drawn to this place where the rice processing takes place and therefore where rice and rice buyers can be found. The mills have become more central, because the traders from Dar es Salaam buy the husked rice and the rice paddy sellers, whether local traders or wakulima (often they are both in one), only husk when they have a buyer. The rice paddy is thus taken to the mill by one owner and comes out as rice belonging to a new owner. Traders also meet at the guest houses and bars around Ubaruku, but the actual transfers of rice always involve the mills.

Just as the green vegetable sellers in Mikoroshoni assist each other, so the rice traders are constantly working together with at least a few other traders who they know. Like the relationship Josephine has with the traders she buys vegetables and coconuts from, the traders from Dar es Salaam are also familiar with the local traders and wakulima they buy rice from in Ubaruku.

At present the mill owners, even the large ones, like Mposi, are in an interdependent relationship with the small wakulima and the traders. Mposi needs the farmers and the traders both to keep his mills and farm machinery working and paid for and to buy his rice paddy. This could change, however, if he had a very large buyer that would buy his rice in bulk, or potentially if he could get that bank loan he could expand his own operations and bypass traders and sell straight to Dar es Salaam. The competition from the other millers and warehouse owners also encourages new investment and keen pricing for the essential services that Mposi and the other mill owners provide.