SEAWEED FARMERS RELY ON THEMSELVES

Seaweed farmers on Zanzibar have to sell their harvest as raw material as the Tanzanian island lacks the infrastructure to process it. This means working hard for little money. But some farmers are quietly rebelling against the system.


By Saumava Mitra, Zanzibar

45-year-old Safia Hashim Makame has managed to produce seaweed soap at home through a simple processing mechanism. This way the mother of six has changed her livelihood. "Before I learnt how to make soap from seaweed, I was just an ordinary farmer. I worked for many hours and afterwards I had to wait for agents to show up so I could sell my crops at a low price. I had no vision! No future!" Safia says. Her success is an example for others in Bweleo village on Zanzibar.

“We get 250 Tanzanian shillings when we sell one kilo of seaweed, but I get a thousand shilling from the sale of a single bar of soap. If you sell just seaweed one wastes so much sweat with minimal benefits," says Sifia. With her new business she has been able to send her children to school and build a house.

Many Zanzibaris, mostly women living along the coast of the Indian Ocean, farm seaweed. They sell their harvest mainly to agents of foreign companies. Most farmers make an average of fourty to sixty thousand shillings per month (20 to 30 euros).

No trade union

According to the Institute of Marine Sciences of Zanzibar, more than thirty thousand Zanzibari seaweed farmers export around seven thousand tons of weed every year. The farmers do not have a trade union or cooperative to fight for their rights.

"We don't have such a thing. We might think about it, but the problem is that people are busy working from dawn to dusk," village leader, Othman Tabu Othman, explains.

Business sparks love

Officers from the Seaweed Corporation of Tanzania say they want to start a seaweed processing facility on Zanzibar’s neighbouring island Pemba so that Tanzanian seaweed can be processed in the country before being exported to Europe and Chile. But the project is yet to see the light of day.

Dr. Narriman Jidawi, a marine biologist at the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Dar es Salaam says: “The seaweed business is controlled by a few individuals who benefit more when they sell the seaweed raw.”

But while government policies dither, farmers like Sifia have found their own way to improve their life. "My husband’s salary is meagre. We never had enough money and poverty rocked our marriage. But when I set up my business, we started loving each other again.

Credit: Radio Netherland