1 Agricultural growth corridors in Sub-Saharan Africa - New hope for territorial rural development or another non-starter? The case of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania Michael Brüntrup Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik / German Development Institute (DIE) 1. Agricultural growth corridors in Sub-Sahara Africa Agricultural growth corridors (AGC) – larger stretches of land along a central transport line flagged for intensified efforts to invest in agriculture - are a relatively recent approach to agricultural and broader economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Gálvez-Nogales 2014) but are following older approach of spatial development initiatives (SDI) (World Bank 2009). Broader economic development is highlighted here because most African AGCs do not simply focus on agricultural production but on fostering backward (services and input supply) and forward (processing, packaging) linkages within the corridor, even if it is not a definitional requirement of AGC. Many AGCs are also planned as appendixes of other types of corridor, often for mineral transport from mine to port (Weng et al. 2013). This is important to note for the distinction of AGC from some similar approaches (e.g. transport corridors or agro-processing parks) or AGCs in other world regions (Brazil, South-East Asia) and for some findings, conclusions and recommendations. AGC have gained prominence and international support inter alia through the United Nations awarding of Yara’s (the world’s biggest fertilizer company) corridor concept (UN 2008), the World Economic Forum since 2008 (Kaarhus 2011, WEF 2012), the African Union’s “New Partnership for Africa’s Development” (NEPAD) and the G7’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSNA 2015). They figure now prominently in several national development strategies on the continent. AGC of the type prolifering in SSA usually combine agricultural policies with agrobusiness and infrastructure investments and pursue 1) agricultural growth, 2) poverty alleviation, 3) opening up of enclaved areas, and, in many instances, 4) regional integration between coastal and land-locked countries (Byiers et al 2014, Gálvez-Nogales 2014, Reeg 2017). They promise to bring together expertise, funding and coordination that are usually dispersed and aim to benefit from multiple synergies that arise and trigger economies of scale and agglomeration. Important aspects that typically cannot be covered or fully exploited by any single sector strategy or infrastructure measure but which may be coupled in an AGC include: Infrastructure development at both national (railway, highway, pipeline) and local level (feeder roads, local electricity supply, larger irrigation systems), agriculture (research, extension, marketing), industry and trade (processing and marketing, trade facilitation), foreign direct investment (investor incentives, one-stop-shops), normal business support (small and medium enterprises in forward and backward sectors to large agro-industries and smallholders), water (water supply and watershed management), and environment (natural parks, natural resources management, forest management and plantation by private sector). In SSA, AGCs are very often planned and managed as strategic private-public-partnerships (that is not a definitional requirement of AGCs) and have large scale land-based enterprises in production (plantations) as their backbone (again this is not a definitional requirement but very