Seaweed Farm Tours in Zanzibar

What a seaweed farm visit actually is

At low tide along Zanzibar's east coast, the lagoon empties and rows of stakes appear in the sand with lines of seaweed strung between them. Women walk out to tend them, tying new shoots to the lines, weeding, and harvesting the crop to be dried on racks and mats along the shore. A seaweed farm visit means walking out with them and being shown how it works.

It is short, usually somewhere between half an hour and an hour, because it is entirely governed by the tide. It is also unshaded, done bent over in shallow water, and it consists of watching people do hard physical work for very little money. That is not a reason not to go. It is a reason to go with the right expectations, and this guide sets out what is actually documented about the industry rather than the version in the brochures.

The tide is the whole logistics problem. The window shifts by roughly fifty minutes a day, so a visit cannot be scheduled for a convenient hour, and an operator who offers you a fixed morning slot regardless of the tide is offering you a walk on wet sand.

How the industry got here

Wild seaweed has been collected and exported from these islands since the 1930s, but the farming industry is recent and its start date is precise: commercial cultivation began in 1989, using strains brought from the Philippines.

Two species matter. Eucheuma denticulatum, known in the trade as spinosum, yields iota carrageenan. Kappaphycus alvarezii, known as cottonii, yields kappa carrageenan, which forms a stronger gel and is worth considerably more. Both end up in the same place: carrageenan is the thickener in ice cream, toothpaste, processed meat, pet food and cosmetics, which is why a lagoon in Zanzibar is connected to a supermarket shelf in Europe.

From the beginning the work has been overwhelmingly done by women. Around eighty per cent of Tanzania's roughly thirty thousand seaweed farmers are women, and research focused on Zanzibar puts the figure higher still, at eighty to ninety per cent. Seaweed farming was one of the first ways many coastal women earned independent cash income, and that is a genuinely significant thing.

What is less often said is that the proportion of women rose as the industry got worse. Figures from Paje village trace it: five hundred farmers in 1993, of whom four hundred and forty were women; fourteen hundred farmers by 1998; and by 2010, a hundred and fifty farmers, all of them women. The men had left for better-paid work. A workforce becoming more female in that way is not straightforwardly a story about empowerment.

What the heat has done

The single biggest thing that has happened to this industry is the sea getting warmer, and the mechanism is well documented.

Kappaphycus, the higher-value cottonii, cannot grow effectively in water above about thirty-five degrees. Water in the shallow lagoons where it was farmed now reaches thirty-eight. The heat drives ice-ice disease, in which the seaweed whitens and disintegrates, and encourages epiphytes that smother the crop.

The consequence is that farmers have been pushed off the valuable species and onto the cheaper one. Spinosum now accounts for around seventy per cent of production. Village-level output tells the same story: Paje was producing forty-five to fifty tonnes a month in the early 1990s and under five tonnes a month by 2010.

There is a known adaptation. Cottonii can still be grown in deeper, cooler water, and deep-water farming is the documented route back to the higher-value crop. But it is blocked for a large proportion of the workforce for a simple and rarely mentioned reason: many of the women cannot swim. Swimming lessons are, seriously and specifically, among the interventions recommended by researchers looking at how to save this industry.

The work, and what it costs

This is the section that travel writing about seaweed farming almost always leaves out, and it is the part a visitor most needs.

The work causes documented physical harm. A study of seaweed farmers recorded musculoskeletal symptoms in the wrist in eighty-seven per cent of them, in the back in eighty-four per cent, and in the lower limbs in seventy-three per cent. The wrists go from the repetitive tying, the backs from hours bent over in shallow water.

Beyond that there is eye damage, including blindness, caused by years of sun glare reflecting off the lagoon; stings from stonefish, which sit camouflaged in exactly the shallows being worked; and cuts from shells and coral that do not heal well in salt water.

And the finding that ties it together: researchers looking at occupational health in this sector found that none of the institutions these farmers deal with has any mandate to protect their occupational health and safety. There is no one whose job it is.

Knowing this changes how you behave on a visit. The women you are walking beside are working, in the sun, in conditions that will damage them over time, and you are there for fifty minutes with a hat on.

Where the money goes

The economics are the other half of the honest answer.

About ninety-nine per cent of Tanzania's seaweed is exported raw, with only around one per cent processed locally. Farmers realise something in the region of thirty to forty per cent of the export price, and there is no institutionalised platform through which they can negotiate collectively. The value is added elsewhere, which is the standard shape of a raw commodity economy and is exactly what value-added local processing is meant to change.

Some enterprises on Unguja do process locally, making soaps, oils and cosmetics from seaweed, and at least one states that it pays farmers and suppliers far above the traditional rate. That is the company's own claim about what it pays for seaweed. It is not a statement about what a visitor's fee does, and the two should not be conflated.

On the fee itself: no source could be found documenting who collects payment for a seaweed farm visit or whether any of it reaches the women who showed you the lines. If that matters to you, ask directly on the day, and buy something processed locally, which is the one transaction whose destination you can see.

One more finding belongs here, uncomfortable for a travel guide to print and included because leaving it out would be self-serving. Research on Paje found that tourism itself drew people out of seaweed farming, and that tourism development has restricted farmers' access to the shore. The industry you are visiting has been damaged in part by the industry that brought you.

Visiting honestly

• Go at low tide, and let the tide set the time. The window moves by about fifty minutes a day. Any operator offering a fixed slot regardless is not taking you to a working farm.
• Wear reef shoes. The lagoon floor is sharp with shells and coral fragments, and stonefish sit in the shallows. This is not optional.
• Hat, long sleeves, high-factor sunscreen. There is no shade and the glare off the water is the thing that damages the farmers' eyes.
• Ask before photographing anyone. A woman at work is not a photo opportunity, and this is one of the most photographed and least consulted workforces on the island.
• Ask to actually help, and accept that you will be slow and clumsy. Tying lines badly for twenty minutes teaches more than watching for an hour.
• Buy something. Locally made seaweed soap or oil puts money into the value-added end of the chain, which is the part that stays in Zanzibar.
• Do not expect a cooperative. Several villages commonly named as having women's seaweed cooperatives could not be confirmed as having one currently operating, and at least one appears in the research only as a place where cooperatives used to exist.

The warming water behind all of this, and how to judge a marine conservation claim, is covered under conservation tours. Seaweed visits otherwise pair with the other things on the east coast, and the village context is covered under village tours, with the cooking that uses these coasts' produce under cooking classes.

Questions travellers ask