Tilling the soil in Tanzania: What do emerging economies have to offer?

Over the last two decades Tanzania's economic growth has been disproportionately biased towards industry and services, denying farmers the distributional benefits that accompany progress. Rectifying the situation requires appropriate tillage tools to raise agricultural productivity. Past attempts to either identify local tools or import technologies from advanced countries yielded limited benefits. Coincidentally, China and India have recently been developing power tillers suitable for their own production environment. Because these emerging economies are themselves developing, we hypothesize that the technologies they generate could benefit other developing countries. This article compares emerging economy power tillers with advanced country power tillers on 95 rice farms in Tanzania. Despite their adverse environmental impact, we conclude that emerging economy power tillers are more beneficial to the poor than are advanced country tillers as they provide a low acquisition cost point of entry for cash constrained producers and are more employment-intensive, and in some cases more economically profitable.