Coffee Liberalization Goes Sour in Tanzania SEBASTIAN PASCHAL 'Globalization insights’ is a series of feature stories told by journalists from Africa, Asia and Latin America – sto­ries that give an insight into the perceptions and experi­ences of people as globalization unfolds in their environs. This project is jointly organized by the Friedrich-Ebert­Stiftung and IPS EUROPA. It is a hard moment for coffee farmers in Tanzania, whose crop was officially liberalized in mid 1990s. What­ever may be pronounced about globalization, for Tanza­nian coffee farmers, liberalization is like suicide. Matekela village, in Matengo Highlands, the once famous area for growing high quality coffee, provides a miserable story on this score. The village is situated in a great val­ley called Hagati, from where you can walk to Lake Nyasa, a water body with borders on Tanzania and Ma­lawi. The victims of trade liberalization are in this village. With over 300 households, Matekela village used to be a home of rich people whose income was mainly derived from selling coffee beans. But globalization has robbed them of their coffee farms, houses and other valuable assets. Some of them have been forced to seek refuge in other areas of the land by relocating themselves in other parts of Mbinga district. The villagers have lost their sense prestige, which they used to brandish for years, especially during the early years of independence. Tanzania, which got independence from Britain in 1961, had early years after independence a very sound econ­omy under the former president, the late Julius Kam­barage Nyerere. If Nyerere’s definition of freedom meant being free from three enemies – ignorance, disease and poverty – is used for categorizing lives in Matekela vil­lage, then"these people are really not free". Going down to the earth is a story on Bone Ndomba. Ndomba was forced to surrender his two coffee farms in 1999; just five years after liberalizing the coffee sector in Tanzania. One of his creditors seized his farms, which were the only sources of his family’s bread, making live difficult to him, wife and his five children. Ndomba was left empty-handed. As the case with other farmers in his land, Ndomba got a credit from a coffee buyer after mortgaging his farm. An agreement was to pay in coffee after harvest. Coffee buyers had introduced the so- called'Futures System', which, however, operated locally. Neither supervision nor regulations were in place to serve the interests of farm­ers. Like other farmers, Ndomba, probably acting inno­cently, saw the Futures System as a lucrative deal. As more private buyers were coming in, the Future Sys­tem was gaining in popularity: a farmer could receive as many credits as possible from different prospective cof­fee buyers, for a promise to pay in coffee. Ndomba got the credits from various coffee dealers by mortgaging his coffee.