Special
Tanzania
TANZANIA HAS LOTS OF FOREST, BUT NOT MUCH WOOD ILLEGAL CUTTING REMAINS A THREAT, BUT THE ‘CAVALRY’ IS COMING
Some initiatives are emerging here and there to safeguard the forests in Tanzania from complete disintegration. Indeed, as is the case in so many places, large areas of forest have been cut for years in order to create extra land for farming or to extract wood for the production of charcoal, the most important household source of energy for families. Tanzania has been a poor country for years and remains poor for the time being. Yet the country has loads of natural resources in the ground, the harvest of which is not shared. In the context of forest management lots of organisations have sprung into action. Let’s hope that the cavalry, for once, doesn’t arrive late.
Geography Tanzania borders on Kenya (769km) and Uganda (396km) in the north, Mozambique (756km), Malawi (475km), and Zambia (338km) to the south, and Congo (459km), Rwanda (217km), and Burundi (451km) in the west. Tanzania borders entirely on the Indian Ocean to the east and the other borders also consist largely of water: Lake Tanganyika in the west, Lake Victoria in the north-west, and Lake Malawi in the
56
Floor Forum International 110
south-west, whilst the border with Mozambique comprises the River Rovuma. Tanzania has a total surface area of 945,087km² and that makes it 22.5 times bigger than the Netherlands and equally as big as France, Germany, and Belgium together. It is also the biggest country in East Africa. The longest distance from north to south (Moshi-Songea) is over 1300 kilometres and from east to west (Dar es Salaam-Kigoma) over 1600 kilometres.
Economic development Until the end of the 1970s, Tanzania was a shining example of a developing country, partly due to large amounts of development aid from abroad. However, early in the 1980s, economic decline set in as a result of price depressions on the world market for major export products such as coffee and cotton and with an underdeveloped transport and communication sector as the main cause. In 1986, the country signed a reform agreement with the IMF and the World Bank, in which the agricultural sector had to act as the base and driving force for development in other sectors. The liberalisation of the economy was set in motion and foreign investment was encouraged. However, development is still running extremely slowly.
