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Discusses the debate around structural adjustment and African agriculture, the history of the Tanzanian cotton sector and farming systems in the main cotton growing area of the country before reporting the results of a small survey of cultivators carried out at the end of the 1997/8 seed cotton marketing season. This survey, carried out in the fourth year of market liberalisation, covered crop sales, farming methods, marketing behaviour and perceptions of the marketing system. The survey’s main findings were as follows:while there was almost certainly a substantial production response in 1995/6 over 1994/5 (for both official production statistics and survey data reported here on shares of cultivated area under cotton in 1995/6 show a big increase on comparable material for 1994), there is no evidence that this response has been subsequently amplified as liberalisation has continued and as monetisation of cotton sales has been institutionalised. Neither official production statistics nor average shares of cultivated area under cotton or average cotton sales as reported here show an increase over the period 1995/6 to 1997/8. In fact they show a decline of production and sales in 1997/8. while the decline in 1997/8 was mainly the result of adverse weather conditions, the underlying failure for production to grow is based on a failure to shift toward more optimal farming methods, and a significant decline in non-labour input use. The latter follows a monetisation of inputs supply. It remains to be seen if input use will also flatten out as this monetisation process becomes institutionalised. In any event, a recovery in input use seems unlikely. primary cooperative societies are currently retaining very sizeable seed cotton market shares, despite offering inferior prices to private traders’ ones and despite having curtailed the supply of inputs on favourable terms. This is partly based on their retention of effective monopolies in certain geographical areas. But they are also surviving in areas of high competition on the basis of the loyalty of a segment of the peasantry. Their ability to retain market share seems likely to weaken as the years pass, since with credit-based input supply no longer being undertaken, loyalty will lose most of its rationale. In addition, cooperatives may experience falling purchases as a result of failures of liquidity and a further decline in price competitiveness. possession of land and cattle, areas under cotton cultivation, cotton sales volumes, membership of primary cooperative societies and marketing behaviour are all socially stratified along lines of oxen ownership/non-ownership. Social stratification is partly attenuated however, most notably as a result of the heterogeneous character of oxen owners as a group. The relationship between socio-economic stratification and some of the attributes discussed above is an interesting one. The group which is best off with regard to land and cattle, has the largest areas under cotton cultivation and the highest cotton sales volumes also has the highest membership of cooperatives and ostensibly the least commercially-oriented marketing behaviour.This pattern dates to the period when cooperatives were important providers of external resources and were thus subject to efforts by better-off groups to control them. little or no differentiation of farming methods according to the described pattern of social stratification could be detected. Apart from differences arising from the possession/non-possession of oxen themselves (i.e., concerning methods of land preparation) the rural upper strata farmed in more or less exactly the same way as the lower one. Liberalisation of marketing in Tanzanian agriculture has (re-) accelerated commodification but has not disturbed the essentially extensive forms it reverted to during the 1980s. This tendency in turn reflects not only the ‘embeddedness’ of certain farming systems, but - as will be explored in subsequent papers -deregulation of markets in forms which exclusively reward quantity of output and which systematically mitigate deficiencies in output quality. [author]
