Tobacco Farming and Agrarian Change in Contemporary Southern Africa - An Introduction

For more than a century, tobacco has been a key source of export revenues for both Zimbabwe and Malawi, and, in the past 30 years, production has expanded to parts of Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania. The crop continues to be the main livelihood option for millions of citizens in southern Africa, an important source of income and rural employment and one of the few industries in which the region commands a large share of the global market. Combined, exports are almost equivalent to those of Brazil, the world's largest tobacco exporter. Despite this sizeable footprint, tobacco has been relatively neglected in the literature on development trajectories and the political economy of the region.1 Much tobacco research focuses on global public health debates concerned with the effects of tobacco consumption.2 Such concerns are certainly warranted: tobacco consumption is responsible for extremely negative health outcomes at both individual and societal levels. However, public health research has shaped the way in which tobacco is studied, often emphasising crop substitution over a careful analysis of the reasons why regions like southern Africa have become specialised tobacco producers, the drivers of its relative success as an export commodity or the implications of tobacco farming for processes of transformation and agrarian change. Tobacco farming has been similarly neglected in the agrarian studies of southern Africa despite its prominent position in regional agricultural exports and being a main source of direct income and employment for African farming households and workers. Sugar cane and maize are two of the most dynamic crops in the region (excluding South Africa): sugar is a sizeable contributor to exports, and maize remains the main staple and the crop with the largest area under cultivation.3 In comparison with sugar-cane production, however, which is broadly concentrated in irrigated and mechanised plantations, tobacco farming is much more labour-intensive and accounts for more farm employment (tobacco also outpaces sugar in agricultural exports in all five jurisdictions). In contrast with maize, tobacco is oriented exclusively to export markets, suggesting that tobacco could be a more dynamic source of agricultural income for small-scale farmers. Tobacco intensification is increasingly associated with a range of spill-over effects, including stimulating local labour markets and increasing demand for maize and other wage goods. This is in contrast with narratives that saw tobacco and maize production competing for agricultural land (see the article by Moses Moyo). This special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies contributes to scholarship on agrarian change in southern Africa as the first collection of papers to assess tobacco production and marketing at the regional level. This comparative focus across Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique highlights how tobacco production is first and foremost a regional phenomenon, which needs to be understood at that scale.