Zanzibar's seaweedy wage earner

Mail & Guardian | 18 Febuary 2011

By Kristin Palitza

Who would have thought? Even who doesn’t like sushi regularly eats seaweed – because the algae is a source for carrageenan, a natural gelling agent used to thicken foods, especially milk products. Seaweeed is also used for the production of toothpaste, cosmetics and medication.

Companies from Europe, Canada und the United States import a good percentage of their seaweed from holiday paradise Zanzibar, which is better known for its spice and coconut exports. Most of the seaweed farmers here, who harvest more than 12,000 tonnes a year, are women.

Farmer Jabu Abdulla is sitting in the warm, shallow water of the Indian Ocean, her legs stretched out in front of her. For the past ten years, the mother of seven has been farming a small seaweed field off the beach of Jambiani, a small village on Zanzibar’s east coast.
Commercial seaweed farming was introduced to Zanzibar, which has a population of one million, two decades ago and has since then created more than 10.000 Jobs.

The tides dictate Abdullah’s work rhythm. When the water recedes, she walks barefoot out to her field. Each plot is relatively small, an average of 50m², but seaweed grows daily at about seven percent and can therefore be harvested quickly. The women pull the algae in big sacks on land, where it is dried and weighed by traders. From here, it is shipped north in massive containers.

Even though the work is badly paid – seaweed farmers earn between 150 and 250 Rand a month – it enables many uneducated women, who would otherwise be unemployable, to gain a degree of financial independence. Only few women and girls have access to education in Zanzibar’s patriarchal society, where 98 percent of the population belong to the Islamic faith.

Since Abdullah’s husband died three years ago, the 38-year-old widow is her family’s only breadwinner. “It’s not easy for us. But I am glad that I have this job. Otherwise we would be starving,” says the plumb farmer, who can neither read nor write.

Every month, she harvests an average of 125 kilo seaweed, she says, which only brings in about 175 Rand since the traders pay 1.4 Rand per kilo. “I work hard but earn little. It’s only the big companies who make lots of money through exports,” she laments.

Life is a little easier for Abdullah’s colleague, Fatime Mgoli. The 32-year-old doesn’t earn much more than the widow, but her husband, a fisherman, makes enough money to feed his wife and five children. With Mgoli’s second salary, the family can buy luxuries, such as two beds and a sewing machine.

“We now even have electricity. Most villagers can’t afford that,” says Mgoli, who lives with her family in a small, thatched stone and clay house. Other seaweed farmers use their incomes to renovate their houses and pay school fees, while some can even afford radios, tape recorders or mobile phones.

When companies started to commercially farm seaweed in Zanzibar in the late 1980s, both women and men were trained in the trade. “But as soon as it became clear that the salary is low, the men dropped out,” explains Haji Mande, manager of the Kibidija Seaweed Farming Cooperative in Jambiani. Men generally have access to better education than women and therefore to better paid jobs.

The cooperative does its best to improve the working conditions of the algae farmers, but so far with little success. “The traders dictate the prices, and we can’t do much about that,” complains Mande. Since there are no minimum wage regulations in Zanzibar, the cooperative doesn’t have a legal basis to negotiate.

In Jambiani, most of the seaweed is bought by American firm Zanea Seaweed Ltd, one of the three biggest seaweed exporters in Zanzibar. Although the island can’t compete with Indonesia and the Philippines, which produce annually more than 100,000 tonnes of seaweed, the quality of the East African algae is rated by experts as superior.

Zanea general manager Zubeir Khamis admits that seaweed farming is work-intensive and badly paid, but claims his company creates thousands of jobs for unskilled women, who would otherwise be unemployed. “We buy the harvest of about 7,000 seaweed farmers and thereby create more jobs than any other sector on the island”, he says.

In his opinion, it is government’s fault that the farmers are not better off. Seaweed traders, like Zanea, could pay better rates if the market was regulated more strictly, argues Khamis: “If we had more trade securities, we could pay higher prices.”