Suitability of Land for Agriculture in Tanzania

Agriculture is vital to the economy of Tanzania, providing many jobs and contributing to a large portion of the GDP. This project sought to answer the following question: What land is suitable for agriculture in Tanzania? We hypothesized that in addition to land currently in use for agriculture, there would exist additional land suitable for agriculture that had not yet been realized as such. We used logistic regression to created a model that predicted agricultural suitability across the country. We evaluated twenty variables and came up with nine predictors of agriculture that we included in our final model. The results of this study were inconclusive but our model showed that some areas that are suitable for agriculture are currently unused for this purpose. Our model suggests that conservation areas tend to be less suitable for agriculture; however, our model likely over-represents the importance of roads and urban centers as predictors of agriculture suitability. Thus our model more accurately predicts agricultural suitability of land outside conservation areas. We were unable to accurately predict land suitability for agriculture within conservation areas because of the relative lack of roads and the absence of urban centers within their boundaries.