Although many rural development projects in dry land Africa have encouraged rural people to plant trees on their landholdings, the actual achievement generally remains far below its target. Taking a case in central Tanzania, this paper clarifies the factors which lead rural people to adopt the practice of tree planting. The paper concludes that the instability in existing conditions of landholding, brought about by land reform, stimulated people to adopt tree planting on their homestead farms.
Land reform was carried out through the villagization program of 1974, which aimed to gather and settle people into target village areas. The reform dictated that each homestead farm and distant farmland held by a single household be 0.2 ha and 0.8 ha respectively, and that these holdings be newly allocated or titled by the village government. Land reform destabilized people's existing land rights of occupancy because any holdings which did not conform to these regulations were subject to confiscation and redistribution to other settlers by the government. But the actual procedure of redistribution followed customary practice of land transfer which rural people were quite used to, and as a result they took various measures in order to avoid government acquisition of their holdings under the terms of land reform.
As one countermeasure, tree planting was adopted by those people whose homestead farms were larger than the legal size, and by those who had received their holdings through private connection without official permission. They recognized that planting exotic trees with high cash value such as
Grevillea robusta, on the boundaries of homestead farms, increased the farm's cost of transfer well above the previous level, making it difficult to transfer the land according to pre-land reform custom. Boundary planting of
G. robusta was found to be an effective way of avoiding government acquisition of holdings and maintaining one's rights of occupancy during villagization.
The adoption of tree planting originated in an innovative and active response to a particular need arising in a particular situation, rather than in a passive change brought about by education projects which have encouraged tree planting.
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