Trading Fast and Slow: Fish Marketing Networks Provide Flexible Livelihood Opportunities on an East African Floodplain

Domestic marketing networks in inland small-scale fisheries (SSF) provide food and income to millions of the rural poor globally. Yet these contributions remain undervalued, as most trade is informal and unmonitored, and inland fisheries overlooked in research and policy. Taking a commodity chain approach, we provide a case study of access arrangements governing how people come to enter and benefit from the freshwater fish trade on Tanzania's Rufiji River floodplain. We conducted a repeat market survey, interviews, and participant observation with actors at all levels of the district trade over 15 months. Gender, age, and social capital structured participation patterns, with younger men dominating the more lucrative but riskier fresh trade, older men prioritizing steady income from smoked fish, and women culturally constrained to selling a “cooked” product (i.e., fried fish). Nearly all participants were local, with traders drawing on a complex web of relationships to secure supplies. The majority of market vendors cited the trade as their household's most important income source, with women's earnings and consumption of unsold fish likely to have substantial benefits for children's well-being. Our findings reveal a resilient and pro-poor trade system where, starting with small initial investments, people overcame considerable environmental, financial, regulatory, and infrastructural challenges to reliably deliver fish to rural and urban consumers. Preserving the ecological integrity of Rufiji wetlands in the face of hydro-power development and climate change should be a priority to safeguard the livelihoods and well-being of local inhabitants.

High Stakes Decisions Under Uncertainty: Dams, Development and Climate Change in the Rufiji River Basin

The need to stress test designs and decisions about major infrastructure under climate change conditions is increasingly being recognised. This chapter explores new ways to understand and—if possible—reduce the uncertainty in climate information to enable its use in assessing decisions that have consequences across the water, energy, food and environment sectors. It outlines an approach, applied in the Rufiji River Basin in Tanzania, that addresses uncertainty in climate model projections by weighting them according to different skill metrics; how well the models simulate important climate features. The impact of different weighting approaches on two river basin performance indicators (hydropower generation and environmental flows) is assessed, providing an indication of the reliability of infrastructure investments, including a major proposed dam under different climate model projections. The chapter ends with a reflection on the operational context for applying such approaches and some of the steps taken to address challenges and to engage stakeholders.

Energy and Food Demands, Drivers of Land Grab; A Case of Rufiji River Basin In Tanzania

Land grabs has been a tendy phenomena in the last decade across the grobe with Africa and Asia being the hard hit regions. There has been many drivers that fueled land grabs including the crisses in the food, fuel and finance sector. Attempts has been made by scholars, activists and international communities to define what consitute “land grab” in the contenporay period. Informed by the framework definition of land grabs provided by International Land Coalition’s Tirana Declaration of 2012, this paper uses two cases of foreign land-based agricutural investments to prove the existence of land grabs in Tanzania. Broadly, the two cases are evidence of the global energy and food crises shaping the national and local politics of land governance. These national and local politics are manifested into land grabs dispossesing communities of their land. The paper urgues that there is direct link between the global and the national politics of land grabs. If further shows the role played and approaches used by social movements to resist land grabs.