PART I. EIA IN TANZANIA'S ENVIRONMENTAL LAW AND POLICY

Tanzania does not have and has never had a comprehensive environmental law with mandatory requirements for environmental impact assessment (EIA). This omission may be explained in part as due to the marginal place that environmental matters played in the period preceding the Rio Conference in 1992. In the post-Rio period, the reluctance to integrate EIA requirements in legislation may be seen in the context of the liberalization and deregulation policies in force since mid 1980s whose centrepiece has been privatization of the common wealth and promotion of private foreign investment. This has created fears that putting investors to rigorous and public scrutiny of their projects on environmental grounds may scare them away thus depriving the economy of the badly needed foreign direct investment.

The main reason for such fears is that attention to environmental matters is generally perceived by business and corporate interests and neo-liberal states as only adding to production costs, making countries less efficient and less competitive. It is perceived therefore, that any outlays devoted to environmental control would be at the expense of development and poverty alleviation objectives.

As Nicholas Hildyard has written in his seminal study on the World Bank and the rise of the neo-liberal and neo-corporate state of the 1980s and 1990s, in this age of deregulation characterized by the dismantling of legal and administrative controls deemed to interfere with the operation of the market "limitations on the free movement of capital between countries have been stripped away through international agreements and governments have sought to attract inward investment by creating as attractive a 'policy environment' for business as possible. To do so they have dismantled many social and environmental controls that might add to business costs" (1998: 7-8; emphasis supplied).

This has been a worldwide phenomenon affecting not only the Third World but the industrialized world as well. In the Southern countries, however, this deregulation is now being extended throughout the wider national economy: "Workers' rights to organize and strike have been restricted; environmental regulations weakened; foreign ownership restrictions watered down or abolished; and TNCs (transnational corporations) granted freedom from planning and environmental controls and given permission to repatriate profits without restriction. Since ratification of the latest General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994, these deregulated regimes … have the protection of international law" (Hildyard, op. cit., 8; also see Lissu, 1996: Ch. 2).

Tanzania has not escaped this juggernaut of globalization. The perception discussed above has led to corporate interests in alliance with the liberalizing state to seek to 'deregulate' by avoiding to include stringent environmental provisions in statutes and regulations in respect of foreign investment in Tanzania. In other words, the overriding desire to create "conducive environment" for investors explains the omission of EIA requirements in our national investment law as well as the politico-bureaucratic control of the EIA processes in other legislation which regulate investment in the country. The effect has been that even where statute requires compliance with environmental considerations, in practice this is either totally ignored or its spirit subverted while keeping intact the veneer of legality.