Corridor realities: the impact on agriculture and tourism
Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor in Namibia
Namibia’s long-term development plan, Vision 2030, articulates the ambition to transform Namibia into a ‘logistics nation’. By providing a complete package of international logistics services, goods from the SADC community are to be exported via the ports of Walvis Bay and Lüderitz, thus competing with the large ports in Durban and Cape Town (JICA 2015). Namibia has concluded agreements with the landlocked SADC-members Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe on the allocation of dry ports to enable these countries to engage in maritime trade. Four growth corridors connect Walvis Bay with neighbouring countries: The Trans-Kalahari Corridor (Botswana, RSA), Trans-Cunene Corridor (Angola), Trans-Oranje Corridor (RSA), and the Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor (DRC, Zambia, Zimbabwe) (see map 5.1).
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Map 5.1. The Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor in the Zambezi region [Cartography R. Spohner].
To increase the port’s throughput, the Walvis Bay Corridor Group was established in 2000 as a public-private partnership (PPP). The group is composed exclusively of Namibian members, including ministries, parastatal companies, and businesses associations, which are mainly from the logistics sector. The PPP form allows the Walvis Bay Group to pool resources and the authorities of both transport regulators and transport operators, thus effectively serving as a one-stop shop for coordinating trade along the Walvis Bay Corridors. Based on the assumption that the more accessible the corridors are, the more goods will pass through the Walvis Bay port, cross-border trade is to be facilitated and the infrastructure developed to achieve a more time- and cost-efficient procedure. To equip Walvis Bay for its envisioned role as a regional logistics centre, a new container terminal for the Walvis Bay port was officially launched in 2019, doubling the current handling capacity from 350,000 TEUs to more than 750,000 TEUs. Mainly facilitated by a 200 million USD loan from the African Development Bank in 2013, the expansion enables for the handling of larger vessels of up to 9000 TEUs (NAMPORT 2019). The actual throughput in 2018/2019 was far below these figures; the two Namibian ports together handled only 150,000 TEUs (ibid). At Walvis Bay port, imports (65 per cent, Annual report Namport) currently account for a larger share than exports (35 per cent), indicating that much work has to be done if Walvis Bay is to be transformed into a gateway to international markets.
Since 2014, the Corridor Group aims to unlock the economic potential in the hinterland by providing a business-friendly environment along the corridors. The Australian consulting firm AURECON has drafted a corridor-development master plan for the WBNLDC that incorporates spatial development strategies: the installation of truck stops along the route, green schemes, agricultural hubs, and logistics parks are planned to increase the cargo traffic on the corridor (AURECON 2014). In addition, improvements in ICT and electricity connectivity as well as catalytic investments in key sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and tourism are expected to stimulate economic growth in the hinterland. Katima Mulilo for instance, the capital of the Zambezi region, is to act as a logistical hub to facilitate cross-border trade (JICA 2015). The presence of a weighbridge for trucks and a large number of petrol stations indicate that Katima Mulilo fulfils its intended role. Moreover, the targeted promotion of the agriculture and tourism value chain is expected to increase value creation in the region.
Zambezi futures between nature conservation and agricultural intensification
A link between Namibia’s coastline and the landlocked hinterland has been a goal since the days of the German colonists. In 1890, through the Helgoland-Zanzibar Treaty the German Empire acquired the Zambezi region as a part of a territorial swap with Britain. The German government envisaged to link the colony to the Indian Ocean via the Zambezi River, allowing trade with German Tanganyika (Lloyd 2010). In addition to that, the Zambezi region has abundant water resources and labour force urgently needed for expanding the German Southwest Africa protectorate, while large parts of Namibia are characterized by an arid or semi-arid climate (Zeller 2009). Walvis Bay and the adjacent Swakopmund served as entry gates for colonial troops and supply, but also functioned as a hub for the export of raw materials to the world market. The colonial administration connected the copper mines of Tsumeb in 1905 and the fertile soils around Grootfontein in 1908 to the railroad network leading to the coast. In 1909, German troops led by Hauptman Streitwolf reached the banks of the Zambezi river (Zeller 2009). However, after the troops realized that the Zambezi is not navigable to the Indian Ocean from Caprivi because of the rapids and due to its poor and difficult accessibility, this marked the end-point of infrastructure development towards the north east (Kangumu 2011). During the Apartheid regime, the Caprivi became a very important military base in the fight against the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). The militarization of Caprivi led to investments in infrastructure such as the airport, hospitals, and schools (Leggenhager 2015). As a result of the recommendations of the Odendaal commission, an unpaved road connection from Katima Mulilo to Western Caprivi was built in the 1960s. However, the Zambezi region continued to have only a peripheral status up until the 1990s, when the post-apartheid government decided to establish a tarred road connection. The construction of a bridge crossing the Zambezi River towards Zambia completed the corridor in 2004 (Kalvelage et al. 2021).
The improved infrastructure connectivity enabled lead firms of the tourism value chain to access the resources underlying the production of safari- and hunting-tourism packages: wildlife and a conservation landscape. Several legislations ensure the continuous reproduction of this resource base through the expansion of areas that fall under varying degrees of nature conservation (Kalvelage et al. 2023). Following the designation of national parks in 1990, the conservancy legislation of 1996 entitles rural communities to cluster and form areas with clear boundaries designated for the conservation of wildlife. In return for the implementation of conservation measures, these conservancies are granted rights to use natural resources and benefit from joint-venture agreements with entrepreneurs in hunting and safari tourism (Kalvelage et al. 2022). Large conservation organizations have successfully lobbied for the creation of KAZA in 2012, which serves as an integrated cross-border umbrella for existing conservation land uses such as national parks, state forests, and conservancies with the Zambezi region lying at its centre. These developments have driven the growth of the tourism sector in Zambezi. Starting from four accommodation establishments in 1990, the number has risen to 47 in 2018 (Kalvelage et al. 2021). Between 2004 and 2018, visitor numbers have doubled, reaching 60,000 (ibid.). Recent research has shown that during high season, tourism-related traffic on the corridor in Zambezi region accounts for 25 per cent of the total traffic. Yet, this traffic is directed towards Botswana, while the corridor connecting Zambia is mainly used by trucks transporting copper, timber, and other goods (ibid.).
Despite the overall increase in tourism arrivals, a closer look reveals a more nuanced picture. Hunting tourism in the Zambezi region is governed by domestic actors from Central Namibia, but high quota fees are to be paid to the conservancies (Kalvelage et al. 2023). Regarding safari tourism, global lead firms cooperate with inbound tour operators that are mainly based in Windhoek and Swakopmund. Therefore, value from safari tourism is transferred to these major nodes along the corridor and beyond to the Global North. All in all, conservancies as local institutions are able to capture roughly 20 per cent of the value created from hunting and safari tourism due to benefit-sharing agreements (Kalvelage et al. 2022). While tourism taps growth potential from natural resources in the region, the development effect is limited: linkages to local enterprises are scarce, and only 3 per cent of Zambezi’s workforce are employed in the tourism sector, predominantly in low-wage jobs such as receptionist, cleaning staff, or gardener (Kalvelage et al. 2021). Tourism-related revenues account for not more than 5.5 per cent of the total household income in the rural areas of the Zambezi region (ibid.). To put this figure into perspective, pension payments to residents of the region older than 60 are four times as high (ibid.).
Besides tourism, the Namibian government sets high hopes for the intensification of agriculture along the corridor. Top-down decision-makers, e.g. from the Namibian Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform (MAWL) articulate further investments in agricultural intensification in order to correspond to the visions of the Zambezi region as the country’s food basket (Hulke and Revilla Diez 2022, Kiesel et al. 2022). Parastatal organizations under the umbrella of the MAWL, such as the Agro-Marketing and Trade Agency (AMTA), and the Namibian Agronomic Board (NAB) aim to facilitate smallholder farmers’ market access and intensify domestic production through large-scale irrigation schemes (green schemes). However, green-scheme projects like Kalimbeza rice in the Zambezi region did not take off. The few smallholders working as outgrowers on the farm report immense losses of income in the last two years, and thus precarious livelihoods (Hulke and Revilla Diez 2022). This has been further aggravated by climate-change-induced droughts. Although agricultural intensification in the form of green schemes is visible in other regions along the corridor, rural livelihoods in Zambezi still mostly depend on (subsistence) small-scale agriculture. Processing activities (such as milling), packaging, and marketing of the agricultural value chain in the Zambezi region are almost solely bound to Katima Mulilo, where several local supermarkets, street vendors, and an open market are increasingly purchasing from local farmers (Hulke and Revilla Diez 2022).
Due to these recent endeavours by ‘regional lead firms’, a regional horticulture value chain is emerging – however, rather as an unplanned side effect of agrarian policies and top-down development visions (ibid.). Agrarian policies that aim to promote domestic value-chain integration of local farmers include protectionist border-closing practices, enforced by the NAB and AMTA. However, the same interventions tend to foster insecurities for both producers and traders due to their unsynchronized and unforeseeable character. Simultaneously, endogenous collective action among farmers in a regional horticulture association has emerged to react to the market insecurities and gain power, knowledge, and resources. This new form of organization helps farmers to create links to regional markets, e.g. through verbal contracts with supermarkets that persist even when open borders allow for cheaper imports, and thus improves the position of Zambezi farmers within horticulture value chains (ibid.). In contrast to corridor plans that actively try to integrate rural hinterlands into formal value chains, this value-chain-related local development is unrelated to the WBNLDC. In the Zambezi region, the WBNLDC is merely a central transport route that brings food from southern regions and facilitates regional cross-border traffic for food imports from Zambia.
To sum up, the WBNLDC was initially designed to increase the ports’ throughput and in this way contribute to the vision of transforming Namibia into a ‘Logistics Nation’. The set of actors involved in the planning of the corridor shows that logistics remains at the centre of attention and the making of this vision is driven by interests of the Walvis Bay Port. The expansion of the port’s handling capacity points the way to the future and requires the mobilization of resources in the hinterland to meet the ambitious development goals. However, the mobilization of resources that can be shipped to the world market does not necessarily meet the needs of the hinterland’s population. While most Zambezi residents welcome the tar road connection to the rest of Namibia and tourist arrivals are increasing, the economic benefits of this connection at a local level are still limited. In particular, taking the perspective of non-participating actors, such as small-scale farmers that are not benefitting as expected from such infrastructure developments (Hulke et al. 2020, Hulke and Revilla Diez 2022) reveals the pitfalls of growth corridor visions and implementations.
The Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor in Tanzania
Initiated in 2010 at the 20th World Economic Forum hosted in Dar es Salaam, the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) was designed through a PPP between global agribusinesses, the Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete, and international donors. In reaction to the ravaging global food and finance crisis in 2007/2008, the SAGCOT promotes the idea of an agriculture-oriented development corridor. On the one side, SAGCOT is envisioned to alleviate food scarcity and poverty, and on the other side it promises new investable assets and markets for globally operating agribusinesses and investors (Mbunda 2016, Müller-Mahn et al. 2019, Luxen et al. 2022). Based on this win-win imperative, the SAGCOT vision is articulated in an Investment Blueprint, which allures with the promise of bringing 350,000 hectares of arable land into profitable production, the creation of at least 420,000 jobs along agricultural value chains and, ultimately, the lifting of more than two million people out of poverty (SAGCOT 2011).
In a territorial understanding, SAGCOT aligns foremost with existing colonial and postcolonial linear infrastructures along the Dar es Salaam Corridor. Even under German and British rule, the corridor’s Southern Highlands and the Kilombero Valley had already been promoted as prime areas for agricultural intensification and large-scale farming (Jackson 2021). After independence, the construction of the TAZARA railway between Dar es Salaam and the Zambian Copperbelt region became a turnkey project for demonstrating an emergent Pan-African socialism between Tanzania and Zambia as well as for clustering agricultural development under Nyerere’s ujamaa policies (Monson 2009). Resonating strongly with these colonial and post-colonial legacies of the Dar es Salaam corridor, SAGCOT’s territorial approach defines agricultural clusters under the aim of nudging and accelerating agricultural change towards market-oriented and globally integrated production (map 5.2). This approach of spatially focusing economic activities and financial flows therefore follows mainly (neo-)classical planning paradigms usually pursued to create innovative and competitive industries through clustering (Steffens et al. 2019).
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Map 5.2. The Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) [Cartography R. Spohner].
The territorial component of SAGCOT is further expanded by a networked approach. Rather than just geographically directing investments into SAGCOT’s clusters, the concept raises the need for public and private investments along the entire agricultural value chain. This implies that public spending on agricultural subsidies (e.g. seeds, fertilizers, and other implements) and infrastructures (e.g. roads, logistics, electricity), and especially also private investments in different value-chain segments (e.g. input trading, production, output trading) are coordinated and refocused to transform agricultural value chains from input sourcing through production and up to marketing. To attract and govern such inflows of capital, SAGCOT is hence not only demarcating a bounded territory, but just as well nurturing a transnational network of potential investors, national elites, and the community of development actors willing to provide the necessary capital (SAGCOT 2011).
The combination of demarcating space and constituting a network of SAGCOT stakeholders is seen as paramount among the consultants, businesspeople, and politicians promoting SAGCOT. Through this two-sided approach towards Tanzania’s rural future, early hopes associated with SAGCOT were to ultimately ‘kick-start a virtuous circle of improving productivity, falling costs, rising profitability and sustainable growth’ (Palmer 2010: 11). Hence, rather than being driven by colonial regimes (colonial time) or the socialist state (postcolonial time), SAGCOT prominently aimed at leveraging the private sector and a market-driven approach to transforming the corridor region’s agricultural sector. Ten years after SAGCOT’s launch, and hence entering the second half of its lifetime as per design, the future that SAGCOT envisions in territorial and networked terms is at a crossroads, however. This is explained by two major stages in SAGCOT’s implementation.
SAGCOT in motion: deploying future
When president Kikwete announced SAGCOT in 2010, initial letters of intent with donors and investors had already been sealed. In the period until 2015, some of these commitments indeed led to unprecedented flows of subsidies and investments into SAGCOT’s clusters and along the agricultural value chain. Most illustrative of this are investments in large-scale farms, or as identified already in the blueprint: ‘early-win investment opportunities’.
Several studies cover how investments in large-scale farms such as Kilombero Plantations Limited (Kilombero Cluster), Silverlands Tanzania, Clinton Development Farm, Mtanga Farm (Ihemi Cluster), or Unilever Tea (Mufindi Cluster) created a handful of lighthouse projects (Bergius et al. 2018, Sulle 2020). Rarely setting up new farms, but usually reinvesting in already operational or abandoned farms, substantial private-capital investments and escorting patient capital from donors and philanthropists was used to financialize and showcase SAGCOT’s future – mainly through large-scale farms that could integrate smallholders into their operations (Hartmann et al. 2021). Against all past experiences of an underwhelming performance of such farms in Southern Tanzania (Coulson 2015), this seemed initially to make a case for the feasibility of SAGCOT.
In parallel, and less covered by literature, more mundane smallholder agriculture was affected by SAGCOT (Brockington and Noe 2021). With value-chain investments at the input segment, the availability of seeds, fertilizers, and agrochemicals increased strongly as multinational input manufacturers such as Syngenta (seeds, chemicals) and Yara International (fertilizer) expanded their value chains into the corridor (Tups and Dannenberg 2023). Again, flanked by generous financial subsidies, these new value chains were designed to fuel what one could call a mini green revolution, especially in SAGCOT’s Ihemi and Mbarali clusters. In total, these arrangements between SAGCOT’s stakeholders, the agricultural input industry, and international donors culminated therefore in the gradual naturalization and assembly of an input-intensive, market-oriented agricultural future among smallholder farmers (Tups and Dannenberg 2021).
In the early SAGCOT implementation stage, especially interventions in smallholder agriculture hence became pivotal for communicating SAGCOT’s success. To counteract increasing criticism that SAGCOT’s focus on large-scale farms might merely benefit multinational companies and fuel land grabs, the ‘smallholder slot’ became a vital resource for ‘greening SACGOT’ (Buseth 2017). Value-chain integration of smallholders served both to justify SAGCOT in general and large-scale farm investments in particular (Hartmann et al. 2021). Interventions and successes targeted at smallholder farmers were increasingly brought to the foreground when communicating SAGCOT’s success stories. In this sense, the alluring vision of SAGCOT was followed and stabilized by a set of anticipatory actions which indeed affected both large-scale and small-scale farming. Simultaneously, it created scope for global agribusinesses to capture value through newly emerging and highly subsidized chains for agricultural inputs.
Despite these early efforts, by the end of Kikwete’s presidential term (2015), the implementation and public discourse around SAGCOT remained torn between the selective demonstration of successes stories and widespread critique of non-performance, nepotism, or even neo-imperial processes of dispossession and accumulation (Bergius et al. 2018, Bluwstein et al. 2018). Although Kikwete launched a military-inspired ‘delivery lab’ (2013–2015) to preserve his legacy, the early excitement about SAGCOT gradually faded both among domestic and international actors, at the latest by 2015 (Coulson 2015).
SAGCOT at a crossroads: failing promises?
Since 2015, SAGCOT is therefore at a crossroads. Adding to the slow progress of SAGCOT’s implementation, the looming critique of SAGCOT’s design and a gradual phasing-out of several donor projects, the Tanzanian political economy experienced a major rupture, which existentially jeopardizes the SAGCOT vision. With the election of Kikwete’s successor John Magufuli, Tanzanian politics have shifted from clearly neoliberal politics of ‘economic diplomacy’ towards hard state politics along the principle of ‘liberation diplomacy’ (Kamata 2012). Claiming that Kikwete failed at negotiating beneficial deals, this principle invoked the need for an ‘economic warfare’ against imperial forces such as multinationals as well as donors (Paget 2020). Under Magufuli’s cabinet, SAGCOT lost most of its former impetus quite suddenly. As a consequence, the SAGCOT vision not only suffered from disenchantment due to its slow implementation and looming critique, but it also lost its crucial top-down legitimacy at the Presidential Office, which had earlier been secured through Kikwete (Tups and Dannenberg 2021). Most illustrative of this has been the withdrawal of an initially agreed 70 million USD World Bank fund in late 2019. This fund was designed to support SAGCOT projects by subsidizing outgrower schemes between private investors and smallholder farmers. In early 2019, the new government had demanded to redesign the fund from targeting private investors towards benefitting regional government bodies (Sulle 2020). Ultimately, these negotiations failed and the government requested to cancel the fund and effectively ‘shelve SAGCOT’ (The Citizen 2019). Under this new political economy, the SAGCOT vision as well as its early efforts of implementation hence became existentially discredited.
Going back to the territorial implications of this shift, the dawning discontinuation of SAGCOT has mixed consequences. Although SAGCOT never led to widespread outspoken positive expectations or resistance among farmers, the declining relevance of SAGCOT’s clusters for global capital is experienced in everyday agricultural practice more indirectly. SAGCOT-supported large-scale farms have either reduced or fully stopped their operations, as escorting capital from donors and philanthropists was gradually and sometimes abruptly withdrawn (Africa Confidential 2019, Hartmann et al. 2021). Simultaneously, attached smallholder donor projects were either scaled down or phased out. This retraction of (global) capital flows into SAGCOT’s clusters and value chains, and the loss of political backing, therefore goes hand in hand with the menacing failure of SAGCOT as a whole. As global capital and donor attention moves elsewhere, a vacuum of accountability, which is marked by rumours and confusion (about withdrawing investments and projects), as well as the gradual decline of initially established value chains (in terms of both agricultural inputs and outputs) seems to be all that remains of the initially powerful SAGCOT vision.