Shifting Baselines

Tanzania used to be two countries. Now, Tanzania still has two sets of fisheries data and two options for reporting their fish catch: report it all (accurate) or report only half (inaccurate). Currently, only the mainland reports their fish internationally; Zanzibar's fish are missing from the statistics.

Again, a brief history is useful: In the past, the mainland (called Tanganyika) and Zanzibar were separate countries. Both Tanganyika and Zanzibar fell under German colonial control in 1886 and then to the British in 1920, after WWI. Tanganyika gained independence in 1961 and Zanzibar followed two years later. In 1964, the two nations merged as the United Republic of Tanzania.

But the fisheries statistics currently represent only one-half of the entire country. Only the mainland of Tanzania is included in FAO data (see graph)--comparing the FAO data vs. the official fisheries data for the Tanzania mainland, the two are almost identical.

What happened to the Zanzibar fisheries data (~25,000 t in recent years)? If you add Zanzibar, total catch is much larger (see second graph), which will make a difference for policy-makers deciding how much fish Tanzanian fish to grant to EU fishing vessels. It also affects per capita fish consumption estimates. Which is why I titled the report (co-authored with Dr. Zeller): Putting the 'United' in the United Republic of Tanzania. Researchers in Tanzania are planning to look into the problem.

While they're at it, they can check out this problem. When I visited Zanzibar last year, plans were being made to celebrate that Queen's Freddy Mercury (born in Zanzibar) was turning sixty. Then some islanders caught word that many gay men were planning to attend the event and shut the party down before it started.

The mainland was also upset during that time--not because of Freddie Mercury's dubious following but because the government had finally seen (nearly two years after its release) Hubert Sauper's film Darwin's Nightmare. I wrote about the Tanzanian government's reaction, which included blacklisting the film, arresting one journalist that agreed to be interviewed in the movie, and writing a defensive article in the Dar es Salaam newspaper. A group even launched a website dedicated to defacing Sauper's character with photos of him cheek to photo-shopped cheek with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Read more about why here.