The Sesame Seed Cash Injection

Tracking change in rural communities over time is difficult. It is also important. If one is to understand what forms of peasant poverty persist, or how and in what ways peasant communities can become richer, then one requires longitudinal studies. These are however few. It is difficult to access the data required for them. The chapter presents one case using assets to track growing prosperity that was built on a boom of sesame production in Rukwa Region in Tanzania. It traces the growth of prosperity that the boom caused and the limits of its spread in rural society.