Development through seaweed fishing in Zanzibar

    Dear readers, 

    Following an exciting seminar where I had the chance to talk one-on-one with Professor Richard Taylor and Professor Julian R. Thompson, and on the advice of the latter, I decided to look at algaculture in Zanzibar. You will see that this fascinating case study intersects with most of the blog thematics. To begin with, you can listen to this podcast on the BBC website from the "Crossing Continents" series (Chloe Hadjimatheou, 2018) untitled "Seaweed, Sex and Liberation in Zanzibar". On the BBC website as well, please read Lucy Ash's very good paper ("The crop that put women on top in Zanzibar", 2018). 

BBC, Lucy Ash, 2018

    Let's start by going back to the origins of seaweed production. If seaweed farming started at the end of the 19th century ("Les pêcheuses d'algues de Zanzibar", Arte, 2017), it only began in Zanzibar in 1989, which is nowadays the 3rd largest producer in the world behind Indonesia and the Philippines (Sciences et Avenir, 2016). Indeed, in Zanzibar, seaweed is the third-largest industry after tourism and cloves, bringing in about $2,4 million annually (Lisa De Bode, 2017). How these algae are produced? The method is relatively simple. Once a cultivation area is selected seaweeds are tied to plastic strings (locally known as tie-ties) and further tied to nylon ropes stretched between mangrove or land-based wooden sticks inserted into the sediment (Lirasan and Twide,1993). After that, you have to wait two months to collect the seaweed (francetvinfo, 2020) and there are height harvests a year (Hadjimatheou, 2018). For example, in 2015, nearly 24,000 farmers harvested over 16,000 tons of seaweed, 90% of which was spinosum, according to the local government (Sciences et Avenir, 2016)! 

You can find more explanations about this diagram in Fröcklin, de la Torre-Castro, 

Lindström, Jiddawi, and Msuya's paper (2012).

    The commercial cultivation of red algae is mainly intended for the American, French and Danish markets ("Les pêcheuses d'algues de Zanzibar", Arte, 2017). I also learnt that Zanzibar may look as a conservative sea-side archipelago but it is definitely another story. Although 99% of the population in Zanzibar is Muslim, this does not mean that women are submissive to their husbands since women have gained independence through the income that seaweed activity generates for them (Hadjimatheou, 2018). So let's take a closer look at the Zanzibar seaweed fishery, which integrates the issue of development through the prisms of gender, food, environmental change and politics. 

            GENDER 

    What are the interactions between algaculture and gender? In Zanzibar, seaweed is a women’s business: the industry employs 26,000 farmers, about 80% of whom are female. This is in contradiction with the consevative Islamic society traditions of confining women to their homes and to domestic labor (Lisa De Bode, 2017). At first the husbands were outraged – they complained that seaweed farming made women too tired for their matrimonial duties. Women who wanted to work need to negotiate with their skeptical husbands. As we learn in the BBC podcast, their husbands now support them because women improve the household standard of living (better housing, better food, purchase of new clothes). 

    Studying the challenges of algaculture is therefore crucial to understand women's situation in Zanzibar. To escape family dependence, women are emancipating themselves by earning money, which is all the more valuable as there are only a few sources of income in this region (Sciences et Avenir, 2016). Their empowerment is also evident because they have learned to resist their husbands' pressure who used to threaten them with divorce if their wives went out to farm seaweed" says marine biologist Flower Msuya (BBC, Lucy Ash, 2018). Seaweed farming have therefore disrupted traditional gender roles liberating women. For instance, Mwanaisha Makame used the fast money she got from seaweed planting to build her own house (Lisa De Bode, 2017). Thanks to the resources of seaweed farming, the Kidoti kindergarten was created (Arte, 2017). Under the impulse of the marine biologist Flower Msuya, women have also started to transform seaweed into goods with higher added value to take advantage of its curative virtues such as soaps, lotions and other natural products (Arte, 2017). However, women’s hard-won freedom is now threatened by climate change (Hadjimatheou, 2018).  

            ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 

    Indeed, because of global warming, harvests are sometimes disastrous. One day the gift from the ocean suddenly stop giving in Paje where seaweed stopped growing for three years from 2011. It gradually returned but only the low-value spinosum and the business is therefore less lucrative today (BBC, Lucy Ash, 2018). Flower Msuya, a senior researcher at the University of Dar es Salaam’s Institute of Marine Science confirms that environmental conditions are changing for the worse: “in the early 1990s up to the early 2000s, when we were measuring the temperature of seawater, temperatures did not exceed 88°. Now, when we go to the same areas -the shallow water areas- it goes all the way up to 98, 100° Fahrenheit” (Lisa De Bode, 2017). According to Narriman Jiddawi, a biologist at the Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, this rise in water temperatures is problematic because "when the water is too warm, the algae cannot grow well and they die". The IMS encourages farmers to cultivate in deeper, colder water to limit "infections" or to plant a more resistant algae such as cottonii, which is also more profitable (Sciences et Avenir, 2016). 

    Algal farming does not have a neutral effect on the environment. On one hand, cultivating seaweed has benefits as it absorbs phosphorous and nitrogen from the atmosphere. Moreover, it can be used as fertilizer, and its biomass can be turned into plastics, chemicals, and electricity. Algal farming -and more globally the exploitation of the ocean surface to produce food resources- could also be interesting to study with regard to the challenge of food security that awaits us in the coming decades. The UN development goals for 2030 thus included an emphasis on sustainable food production, which has in turn heightened the focus on seaweed (Lisa De Bode, 2017). Seaweed may be the new superfood and is also very useful to feed the livestock (BBC, Lucy Ash, 2018). Nevertheless, on the other hand, seaweed farms could have negative effects on seagrasses (Eklöf et al., 2006a), macrofauna (Eklöf et al., 2005, 2006a), meiofauna (Olafsson et al., 1995), microbial processes (Johnstone and Olafsson, 1995), and changing fish community assemblages (Bergman et al., 2001; Eklöf et al., 2006b) as we can learn in Fröcklin, de la Torre-Castro,Lindström, Jiddawi, and Msuya's paper (2012).

Women working in the seaweed fields (BBC, Lucy Ash, 2018)

POLITICS 

    After addressing the gender and the environmental change issues, let's deal with politics. How does seaweed farming relate to politics? Seaweed farming is eminently political because politicians interfere in the subject. Samia Suluhu Hassan, then Minister of Tourism, Trade and Investment, addresses the subject in front of the Arte camera (2017). Similarly, at the parliament building in Stonetown, Amina Salum Ali, Zanzibar Minister for Trade and Industry says she worries about the impact of climate change and wants to encourage sustainable farming (Hadjimatheou, 2018). 

    Beyond the speeches, what are the real actions of the leaders? The government is trying to promote local productors by supporting cooperatives and inviting "investors to come and set up industries using seaweed as a material" says Hashim Moumin, head of the aquaculture department at the Ministry of Marine Resources and Fisheries (Sciences et Avenir, 2016). The local production of beauty products, for example, would make it possible to supply hotels and other wellness centers, but also to stop being so dependent on imports of Thai products, thus developing tourism, handicrafts and agriculture in parallel (Arte, 2017). We also learn in this Arte movie that the government also wanted to revive the seaweed farming sector by sending three people to the Philippines to study seaweed farming and then encourage Tanzanian farmers to differentiate their production (insist on the cleanliness of the seaweed for example) and to innovate (imagine deep water plantations?). Foreign governments also contribute to the funding of research. In July, Flower Msuya and Gachon were part of a group of scientists that received a $7.9 million grant from the UK gov to develop disease-resistant seaweed strains that can withstand higher temperatures (Lisa De Bode, 2017). The government is therefore seeking to maintain the global reputation of spinosum, the red seaweed grown in Zanzibar, by making production more efficient. 

    Furthermore, government authorities have little control over prices, although regulation is necessary because prices are being driven down in order to remain competitive. A kilo of spinosum used to be sold for 700 Tanzanian shillings (0.28 euro) and can now be bought at 300 shillings. The price of a kilo of cottonii has dropped from 1,100 to 700 shillings. Arif Mazrui, the director of ZanQue Aqua Farm, a producer and exporter, also regrets his lack of control over prices and his necessary downward adjustment "to keep our customers" (Sciences et Avenir, 2016). 

    Eventually, the government seems to remain rather immobile in front of the risks incurred by the women cultivating seaweed instead of teaching them how to swim for example (Arte, 2017). When they were asked to describe their general health status only 46% of the seaweed farmers answered that their health was good compared to 84% of the non-seaweed farmers. Women start work early and fatigue accumulates as the work is intense and exhausting. As the table below shows, the health problems associated with seaweed farming are numerous (Fröcklin, de la Torre-Castro,Lindström, Jiddawi, and Msuya's paper, 2012).  

    To put it in a nutshell, algaculture has un unexpected effect on the island not only socially or economically but also culturally (Hadjimatheou, 2018). Seaweed production has a local role in the fight against poverty and in the empowerment of women with the creation of new job opportunities, increase in household income and family welfare (Arte, 2017). Algal farming must now reinvent itself to face the challenges of climate change and the Tanzanian government is already supporting these innovations. I hope, dear readers, that you will have been interested in this in-depth article on the subject of algal farming in Zanzibar, which particularly piqued my interest and which intersects with many topics related to development, be it gender, food security, climate change or politics. I would be happy to read your feedback!