Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape is the fruit of solid research about land deals and development projects in coastal Tanzania, specifically the Swedish EcoEnergy Sugar Project, formerly Sekab’s biofuel investment. Youjin Chung is interested in how rural actors persist and resist on the margins of land enclosures. She uses the spatiotemporal concept of ‘liminality’ as a guiding principle to structure her analysis of capital accumulation and global land-grabbing trends in Tanzania. Now that the EcoEnergy land clearance is suspended, ordinary Tanzanians experience liminality – that is, ‘a sense of being in-between, about to happen, profound and quotidian uncertainty’ (p. 5). Along with the concept of liminality, the author delves into questions of ‘contingency, ambiguity, open-endedness, and the possibility of politics’ around the unfulfilled EcoEnergy development project (p. 11).
Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape is based on ethnographic research undertaken between 2013 and 2016, with some updates from 2018 to 2020, in the Wami–Ruvu river basin, Bagamoyo District. The EcoEnergy Sugar Project concession covers approximately 20,400 hectares (p. 1). Chung’s writing is thorough, and she uses an extraordinarily rich combination of textual and visual methods. These include interviewing, collecting oral histories, participatory community mapping, and photovoice (letting research participants photograph aspects of their own lives). The book is theoretically supported by a critical feminist framework. It tackles key agrarian questions and rural management challenges in the twenty-first century while providing practical applications for debates that cut across geography, anthropology and critical agrarian studies.
Chapter 1 presents the EcoEnergy land deal within the political economy of Tanzania. Chapter 2 examines how the deal conflicts with local people’s interests and customs, and how rural dwellers co-produce the landscape ‘through everyday acts of presence’ (p. 56). Chapter 3 elucidates how new Tanzanian regulations to formalize ownership and negotiate compensations in the EcoEnergy project have unintentionally induced new forms of resistance. Chapter 4 focuses on the subcontractors of day-to-day land deal governance: namely, international consultants and local paramilitary forces. Chung explores how grass-roots opposition politics is organized to fight back against land grabbing. Chapter 5 discusses activist associations and the gendered politics of civic organizations. Chapter 6 follows up with legal litigation practices and what some farmers perceive as ‘the elders’, lawfare’ and ineffectual judicial redress to solve deep-rooted problems (p. 166). Having failed on its own terms, the EcoEnergy project has nonetheless left indelible imprints on the topography and on people’s memories – ‘long inscribed and sedimented in the landscape and felt for generations to come’ (p. 184) – and residents’ lives are forever bounded by the aborted project. Near the end of the book, we learn that the Tanzanian government has chosen a domestic sugarcane plantation investor to replace EcoEnergy.
Rural people have always shaped the landscape in defiance of powerful forces. Chung describes in rich ethnographic detail the processes through which rural actors assert their land rights, insist on their ‘presence and subsistence’ (p. 185), and do not allow a global investment regime to fully enclose them and their land. Chung sensibly relates to the plight of women who suffer doubly under patriarchal rule and developmentalist structures of power. She writes about Bagamoyo’s landscape history, elucidating the persistence of small-scale food producers, who face daily uncertainty and threats of displacement: ‘It feels like we are being squeezed, like we’ve been put in between brackets’ (interview, p. 7). Against such adversities, people continue to develop new tactics of everyday resistance to ‘make sense of their liminal collectivity’ (p. 25) in the EcoEnergy concession. Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape does an excellent job of unravelling the power play on the ground. The book celebrates the opportunities and openings of peasant resistance in contemporary land enclosures.
The research is less clear on how rural actors could upscale their learning so that their ways of approaching or viewing the world might have greater relevance. It would be interesting to explore whether the Tanzanian experience is translatable elsewhere in Africa and whether we can speak of a liminal collectivity of peasant activists at a transnational level. In Chung’s book, most of the land surveyors, security workers, paramilitaries, and other law enforcement agents, are men. This makes the reader wonder if there are women in such positions and if they behave differently. Given the research’s visual potential, the author could consider publishing a colour photobook, hosting a virtual exhibition, or devising supplementary material for classroom use.
Overall, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape is a welcome addition to the humanistic social sciences. Academics, teachers, students and activists working on land development politics will find the book to be an invaluable resource.
