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Africa spice islanders battle market collapse
Wangui Kanina
ARTICLE (December 06 2002) : It is harvest time in Pemba. The clove trees are laden with buds ripe for picking and in the villages the potholed roads are lined with spices spread out to dry.
One of a smattering of islands off Tanzania which make up the romanticised "spice isles" of Zanzibar, Pemba produces about 80 percent of the archipelago's cloves and most of its population depends on the sweet-smelling spice.
In the island's lush and hilly north, the September to December harvest is normally a lucrative time, providing much-needed shillings to see farmers through the year ahead.
But this year, something has gone badly wrong.
In his three-bedroom mud home which he shares with 11 other people, Hamadi Ali Rashid has had to give up one room to store his cloves - 660 kilograms (1,455 lb) of them which, this year, no one will buy.
"I haven't finished my harvest and I don't even have one shilling to pay the labourers," he said, sharpening knives under a coconut thatch to earn a few extra coins. "I have no money because the cloves are not being bought, there's no one to sell to."
Under Zanzibar law, farmers may only sell cloves to the government trading corporation ZSTC which has typically offered lower-than-market prices.
But in October, just as a bumper crop was starting to flow, ZSTC announced it had stopped buying "due to stock taking" and has not bought a single spice since.
Farmers are left penniless and astounded. With no money to pay pickers, they are leaving cloves to rot on trees. Others don't know what to do with stockpiles massing in their dusty homes.
"We don't know what we are going to do with the cloves," said one farmer, who did not want to be named. "The government has refused to buy. Now we don't know what we are going to do with our lives and the lives of our children."
Smuggling a problem: ZSTC officials say they are in a fix which began with an initiative to control mass smuggling out of the island and has been compounded by the collapse of a world market overburdened by a clove surplus.
For years, with ZSTC prices at well below those offered in nearby Kenya, an estimated two thirds of Pemba's crop - which in a good year can reach 10,000 tonnes - was being smuggled.
Angry at losing what used to be the mainstay of the Zanzibar economy, the government clamped down. Roadblocks were raised, curbs placed on ports, marine patrols sent to sea. Those caught smuggling were put in prison for a maximum of 12 years.
The measures worked. At the same time, ZSTC raised its producer prices to encourage farmers not to sell abroad - first to 2,500 shillings ($2.50) per kg in 2001, and in July 2002 to 3,500 shillings, closer to the $4.50 being offered in the Kenyan port of Mombasa.
Now, with a bumper crop in harvest and world prices tumbling to around $4.75 a kg for the best quality cloves and much less for poorer varieties, the corporation cannot meet its promise.
"Last year when we paid 2,500 shillings, people were still smuggling," ZSTC marketing manager Suleiman Jongo said.
"So this season, we were expecting a very good crop and we said 'consider the farmers' and raised the prices. But no sooner had we put that (new) price than the world market collapsed."
Jongo said the government currently had a stock of some 1,500 tonnes which it needed to shift before making a decision about how to start buying again. Other government officials described the situation as critical.
"We are consulting," Jongo said. "That's why we are taking so much time. Better to delay a little than to rush."
Farmers desperate: For the farmers, the economics are irrelevant. They have cloves on their trees, in stock rooms, on mats in front of their houses and desperately need somewhere to offload them.
At a plantation near Makue village, a young girl perches high in a tangled clove tree, cutting off buds and passing them down. In a small stock room nearby, 400 60-kg bags of spices sit waiting, but neither smugglers nor government want to buy.
"What are we to do, leave them on the trees?" said Ali Hamisi Ali, a cassava farmer who supplements his income by picking cloves every year. In one four-month season he says he can earn around $200.
"We are really stressed," he said, his words cutting through the rhythmic snapping of men, women and children separating spices from stems. "We don't know what we are going to eat over the coming holidays. We are fasting (for Ramadan), we sleep hungry."
Pemba, around 60 km (37 miles) off the mainland, is the stronghold of Tanzania's CUF opposition and there is much bitterness in its ramshackle villages and forested coastline towards authorities it sees as disinterested.
The CUF says the government should have liberalised the clove trade years ago. For many islanders the ZSTC's refusal to buy is seen as a political decision.
"Many think it is our punishment by the (ruling) CCM," said taxi driver Abdallah Ali as his car wound through valleys heavy with palms and banana trees. "Our punishment because so many people in Pemba are opposition."
Courtesy Business Recorder
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Pakissan.com;
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