Institutional Challenges to Robustness of Flood Plain Agricultural Systems

The farming of natural flood plains was in many parts of the world the cradle of civilization. The Nile Valley, the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia supported high cultures with complex social structures. These gradually harnessed and changed their own environment into what we often call a Constructed Social-Ecological System – or irrigation systems. The distinct path of development from natural risky flood plain systems to socially controlled environments was in each case the result of an intricate interplay between geo-politics, demography, religion, social organisation and the science and technology of the time. In some cases the transition was caused by collapse, in other cases facilitated by demographic success or political supremacy of invading groups. Thus it is difficult to make generalisations beyond time and place with respect to the robustness of these past systems for risk management and the influence of institutional arrangements. Today there are very few natural flood plains left to study in the warm regions of the world. One such flood plain is the Rufiji Flood Plain in Tanzania, on East Africa’s largest river. Here there has not evolved an artificial irrigation culture, but a robust risk minimising flood plain agricultural system based on staples like rice, maize and peas, and more recently on cotton and fruits. All through the Arab, German and British colonization, various attempts has been made to “modernise” this agricultural system, the result of which was only that new crops and varieties were incorporated into the system in order to make it even more robust. This study starts with the first challenge to this agricultural system; the removal of the population from their dwellings in the flood plain to “safe ujamaa villages” on higher ground in the 1970s. It compares this with the institutional challenges 30 years later when structural adjustment policies, individualized tenure, land “grabbing”, infrastructure development and urban food marked expansion alter fundamental property rights to land and change individual farming strategies. These challenges are considered to be of a more profound character, and more likely to affect the inherent robustness of this flood plain agricultural system than previous ones. However, the key question of what it takes to transform this flood plain system into a controlled socialecological system is not answered here, it lies somewhere in the haze of future collective actions.