REDES DE FILTROS

In May 2013, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) branch opened in Dar es Salaam. This was their first in Tanzania, followed by three more stores over the following two years. The opening of this international fast-food outlet was an interesting phenomenon to explore so I made several visits to KFC and interviewed some of their management including the

General Manager (GM) for the KFC operation in Tanzania. I share briefly on the KFC operation here not because it is an important part of food supply to Dar es Salaam, at least not yet, but more for some lessons and by way of contrast to the main food system of the city. It is also illustrative of the dynamics and risks of this type of ‘food’ corporation coming into Tanzania.

Kuku Foods East Africa is the company that has started the KFC operation in Tanzania. They are a South African owned, but Kenyan based, company that has the KFC franchise for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. They got the licence to open in Tanzania in 2012 along with a “certificate of incentives” entitling them to various investor incentives for setting up operation in Tanzania.

One of the striking things when entering a KFC store in Dar es Salaam is the imagery that is being portrayed. In the first store in Mikocheni the entire wall next to the counter is covered in large pictures of people. There are 11 different images making up the collage of people and, in this African city, eight of the 11 images are exclusively of white people. Two of the images are of black people and one image has a combination of black and white people in it. The GM for Tanzania is a South African woman, a white Afrikaner. She is proud that “KFC is bringing an international brand standard to Tanzania”. Other positive impacts she claims for the operation are employment and training of staff, including training them to deal with customers in English (Tanzania is a Kiswahili speaking country). All of the store managers are brought from outside Tanzania, at the time of the interview they were from the Philippines and India. Everything in the store is imported, including the advertising that comes from South Africa. The boxes and bags that the customers are served in is from South Africa, the tables, cooking equipment, chairs are all imported. Bread rolls for chicken burgers and the coleslaw is imported from South Africa. The chips are flown frozen from the Netherlands.

The only things not imported are the Coca-Cola products that come from the Coca-Cola plant in Tanzania and the chicken. The GM is clear that they would have brought in Rainbow chicken from South Africa if they were allowed to, but “In Tanzania you cannot import chicken”. They therefore had to find a local supplier, so they went to the Bahari Bounty group who have a chicken operation that among others focusses on supermarkets and “International fast food chains” (Bahari Bounty Group, 2015).

The reason for importation is that the “international standards” have to be maintained and all items and all suppliers have to be approved by the KFC head office in the USA. Getting this approval takes time, so it is easier to import an already approved product.

The pricing, as well as the advertising, orientates KFC to a particular wealthier market. In May 2015 KFC were selling 500 ml cold drinks for TSh 2,000 ($ 1.21) and one piece of chicken for TSh 4,000 ($ 2.42). By comparison the popular Jacky’s Bar, which is not at all the cheapest in Dar es Salaam and is also popular with expatriates as well as local clients, was

selling cold drink for TSh 1,000 ($ 0.61) and a whole grilled chicken for TSh 12,000 ($ 7.27), the equivalent of just three pieces of KFC. Jacky’s also has more generous portions than KFC, a far wider menu including more Tanzanian foods, they are owned by two Tanzanian women who can often be found there eating and drinking their own products, and they buy from a range of local suppliers.

Asked about health concerns with the high fat and salt content of KFC products in the context of growing obesity, the GM argued that it was people choosing to eat too much and not exercising that is the problem, not their product, as she said “the culprit is the human race, not what is offered”.

The challenges that KFC face are the logistics especially of importing things, which includes having to get Tanzania Food and Drug Authority (TFDA) and Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) approvals. There is also poor infrastructure and unreliable electricity supplies requiring generators. The GM noted the language challenge as people do not speak English as well as they do in Kenya and Uganda. But, the GM said they are doing Ok and noted “every day you learn about Africa. As time goes by you conquer all these things”.

The company wants to expand across Tanzania and the GM shared that KFC had five stores in South Africa in the 1970s and now have 700-800, “we see this sort of potential in Tanzania” she said.

5.7. Conclusion

We see in these examples of trading places some of the core characteristics of the symbiotic food system, which will be elaborated further in the concluding Chapter Nine, as well as some of the challenges of the corporate outlets.

The symbiotic characteristics include the way many actors are completely interdependent, relying on others, but with no centralised management. The way different parts of a slaughtered cow, or chicken, form business opportunities for different people is probably the most graphic, but not only illustration of this phenomenon. We see the way actors are assisting each other, such as neighbouring shopkeepers and stallholders watching stock and selling for each other, rather than or as well as competing with each other. The low barriers to entry into the business, combined with collaboration, can be seen in how shopkeepers and security guards can become business owners with the little capital they can save along with the advice and assistance they receive from others already in the business. Even with the relatively large investment in rice milling and warehousing operations in Ubaruku, the owners are still dependent on and serving wakulima and small traders.

The people’s markets involve a range of forms and levels of association. A lot of this fits with the theory of common pool resource management with governance structures and rules of operation to ensure the shared physical infrastructure and market demand are used sustainably to members’ mutual benefit (Ostrom, 1990). These include mutual assistance such as the Cargo Porters in Kibaigwa organising health and education assistance for their

members and the contributions of members to things like funeral costs in Mikoroshoni. We also see, however, that markets in some places operate in a similar way without formalised structures, for example, the rice trading around the mills in Ubaruku. This is based more on symbiotic realations, rather than the structures and rules found in common pool resource management. These trading places and activities, structured or not, have a high level of inclusion, meet practical needs and build community.

The trading places and markets supplying Dar es Salaam have similarities to the concept of “nested markets”, but also differences (Schneider et al., 2015; Van der Ploeg et al., 2012). Importantly we can see that, unlike nested markets, they are based on long-standing practices and they are not created for a purpose or as an alternative to the dominant food system. They are the dominant system meeting food needs of the eaters in the city.

The dukas in particular create spaces and opportunities for social interaction close to where people live thus enabling, almost requiring, people who live near to each other to meet and interact if they want to buy. All this is contact that contributes to holding communities as well as the food system together. The space outside and around Mama Hamisi’s shop is, like the market area it is part of, also a social space, the traders all know each other and many of their customers stop to talk. Inside the market the stall holders have ongoing interaction with each other as well as with their clients, building trust and familiarity.

Supermarkets, on the other hand, draw people away from the streets on which they live and create a more depersonalized shopping experience. There may be a certain social space created, especially at the linked coffee shops, but this is a very elite grouping more detached from the majority of residents in Dar es Salaam. Customers help themselves from the shelves and can pay the cashiers and leave without saying a word. The Purchasing Manager does not know where the suppliers and foods are from and the buyers have no direct contact with anyone involved with or linked to the production. The high level of personal contact at the duka is replaced by packaging, labelling and refrigeration which is all aimed at inspiring consumer confidence. The viability of the supermarket model also comes into question with both Shoprite from South Africa and Uchumi from Kenya failing to survive in the Tanzanian market.

A company like KFC is completely inaccessible to the small local suppliers and could never buy from the people’s markets. The very nature of the markets and the food system that works for most eaters in Dar es Salaam is inaccessible to a corporation like KFC with its procedures for approval of suppliers and supplies. It can only relate to corporations like itself that have production processes divorced from the variation of particular local contexts or changing seasons. In stark contrast, the predominant food system feeding Dar es Salaam is made up of many actors who are completely embedded within the local context and follow the seasonal and other shifts of that context. KFC comes not only with its own food, but also its own images, its preferred language and all of these are determined and overseen by a corporation from elsewhere through its imported managers in Tanzania. KFC currently

reaches only a small elite target group, but that could change and the implications of the expansion of this approach could be enormous for food producers and others.

It is remarkable how often development interventions involve building the infrastructure of market places not realising that the market is not the building but the exchange of goods and money. Market infrastructure where there is existing trade makes sense and can add value through improving the conditions for the people and the food in the market place. Market infrastructure will, however, never create the actual trading. I have seen a number of white elephant projects in the form of empty market places due to this misunderstanding of the relationship between the market as trade and the market place.

In all the examples of people’s markets given above, the trading pre-dated the infrastructure of the market place. At Mikoroshoni the existing traders with their businesses created the market space. They continue to receive very little assistance for this despite the important economic and community function the market performs. At Kibaigwa the trading activities also pre-dated the market infrastructure that was put in by government and donors. Two important additional success factors for Kibaigwa Market can be seen and learnt from. One is the continuation of a central role for the cargo porters and their association which anchored the existing trading relations with their services of unloading, loading and security. Two is the weighbridge, which provides a new and important service, quick and accurate weighing of large amounts of grains, that adds value for the traders and thus encourages them to use the facilities and space even though there is a cost. At Ubaruku there is no organised market space, showing how it is not a market place that makes a market. There has, however, been the provision of key infrastructure - electricity and roads - that has enabled the growth of a milling industry and it is around the key service of milling that trading has developed. The success of a market place depends on the actual, normally pre- existing, trade and the provision by the market place of a key service or services that add value to the trading.

Interestingly in both the case of Kibaigwa and of Ubaruku the state and donor interventions happened in response to health and safety concerns, not initially with the motivation to actually stimulate trading. This indicates how short sighted the state and many development agents are when it comes to seeing and responding supportively to market activities. Many of the trading places are structured around key parts of the production process. At Ubaruku it is around the rice husking, in the chicken and beef cases around the slaughter process. At Ukonga-Mazizini the meat is bought from where it hangs directly over the floor where the cow was slaughtered only an hour or so before. At Shekilango the chicken slaughter areas surround the space where the live chickens are kept and sold. The live animal is converted to meat and sold in the same space with an immediacy and lack of the separation and distantation of the traders, buyers and butchers from each other.

Chapter Six – Staple Foods: Maize, Rice and Potatoes

6.1. Introduction

This chapter maps the supply of the key staple foods of maize, rice and potatoes to Dar es Salaam. These foods provide the primary source of carbohydrates for the majority of eaters in the city. There are other important staples, such as cassava and bananas/plantains, but it was beyond the scope of this study to look at all of them. The supply of the staple foods that were looked at provides a useful lens through which to look at the food system that feeds the city as they are central to meeting people’s food needs. Through their more spatially distant origins, these foods challenge those who have tended to focus narrowly on the local, ‘short food supply chains’ and planning for food production within city regional administrative boundaries. We will need to think beyond such geographic and administrative limits if we are to meet the food needs of urban residents.

For the last century the supply of grains and other foods to Dar es Salaam has drawn on production in different regions of the country as well as at times involving imports (Bryceson, 1987). The symbiotic food system supplying Dar es Salaam, while covering an extensive area, looks very different from the internationally dominant agro-industrial food system. This chapter will also highlight the importance of the urban market for the livelihoods of wakulima in the rural hinterland and rural development more broadly.

Tanzania produces most of the food, especially basic foods, that it needs, and most of this production is done by wakulima in the six million households that are engaged in agricultural production with an average of just 1.3 hectares of land each. Around 3.5 million households plant maize, 1.2 million grow rice and only around 110,000 grow Irish potatoes (National Bureau of Statistics, 2012a). Maize and potatoes are grown almost exclusively by small farmers in Tanzania and around 90% of rice production is also by small farmers (Photograph 7)(SAGCOT, Undated). Low productivity and lack of access to land and inputs are constraints (The World Bank, 2012; National Bureau of Statistics, 2012a), but despite this production has increased steadily and significantly over the recent years with rice paddy production doubling between 2004 and 2014 and potato production going up 2.5 times in the same ten year period (FAOSTAT, 2016).

Today in Tanzania there is some importation of rice and maize, but also some exports to neighbouring countries. More significant amounts of wheat, soy and cooking oil, as well as other processed foods are imported (SAGCOT, Undated). It is found that the bulk of key staple foods essential to the diet of the majority of residents of Dar es Salaam are being produced and transported across a geography that includes far flung rural parts of the country (Figure 2). That there is not more staple foods imported from outside the country is in part due to the tariff and other regulatory protection of the national market (East African

16 _{Substantial portions of this chapter were previously published as a journal article (Wegerif and}

Community, 2012; Ministry of Finance and Planning, 2014) and because there is a functioning food system that delivers within the country.

The importance of selling their crops is shown by the fact that sales of food crops is the primary source of income for 61.5% of the six million farming households, followed by sale of cash crops that is the primary income for 9.9% (National Bureau of Statistics, 2012a: 17). Production by small-scale wakulima continues to be the mainstay of livelihoods for rural people and, as has been the case since the beginning of the last century, it continues to be the main source of food for Dar es Salaam and the nation as a whole. There have been periods of crisis in the supply of food to Dar es Salaam which have been created by wars (the two world wars and then the war with Uganda), droughts and misguided colonial and post- colonial interventions in the food system. After each period of crisis, it has been wakulima who have been central in the impressive recoveries. As Bryceson puts it, “[i]n the wake of this devastation the upsurge of grain production and exports in the early 1920s has to be viewed as remarkable” (Bryceson, 1987: 163). Despite the heavy toll of poverty, disease and mortality that peasants suffered “[i]t was the peasant sector which provided the bulwark of productive dynamism in the recovery” (ibid: 187). This wakulima driven recovery in food, especially grain supplies, happened again in the 1950s and again after liberalization from the mid-1980s onwards (Bryceson, 1987; Bryceson, 1993; FAOSTAT, 2016).

When it comes to supplying food for Dar es Salaam, “[w]hile the main actors in the evolution of the city’s food supply have been the urban consumers and peasant producers, marketing agents have been the vital go-between” (Bryceson, 1987: 157). These marketing ‘agents’ (dalalis and traders) have changed over time due, in part, to the regulatory interventions of the colonial and post-colonial governments. For the first half of the 20th century an ‘Asian’ commercial class dominated trade. Towards the end of the colonial era and in the 1960s African run cooperatives arose and where for a time state supported, until the state imposed the state-owned National Milling Company (NMC) to play the central role in food distribution. The failings of the NMC led to a reinstatement of a state sanctioned and supported role for cooperatives in the early 1980s. With the further liberalisation of trading in the mid-1980s, small-scale African traders came to the fore and have continued to play the central role up to now. Significantly, through all of the interventions, including virtual bans