Abstract. Full-text Book Chapter available at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-38922-2_21
This chapter presents an analysis of the economic crisis of neoliberalism with a focus on the growth of the coffee industry in Tanzania. It explicates the economic and political crises of neoliberalism with a focus on the transformation of coffee industry and the reproduction of weak cooperative societies in Tanzania as opposed to the predictions of dispersal of the political and economic power of neoliberal transitions. At the center of this analysis is the critical issue regarding the effects of neoliberal policies on the rural economy, taking the coffee industry as a case study. The chapter first looks at the commencement of the private marketing and charts the transformation of the coffee industry in Tanzania. An extensive body of literature has shown that for the past few years the government of Tanzania has initiated some interventions in the country’s coffee industry, all aimed at fighting the grain of neoliberal market reform. The chapter then explains the impact of the subsequent economic crisis in Tanzania, which resulted in the decline of the coffee sector. It also describes these changes and locates them in the broader literature on neoliberal reforms in Tanzania and how neoliberal policies have affected cooperatives which were once the key agents for coffee marketing. The chapter concludes by showing how neoliberal crises in the form of economic crisis can create opportunities for reassessing the relationship between private capital and the state capital in revamping the coffee sector. Thus, exports of coffee contribute hugely to the growth of the Tanzanian economy.