Cotton is produced in a large number of African countries and is a significant source of livelihoods and foreign exchange in several of these. Although it is not the focus of this paper, forward integration from cotton production into spinning, weaving and garments manufacture is attractive to some African governments, including Tanzania’s, as a step towards broader industrialisation goals. Technical analysis (e.g. Poulton et al 2004, Tschirley et al 2009) has identified the challenge of balancing competition and coordination in developing and sustaining a successful cotton production sector in Africa. In these analyses, Tanzania’s hyper-competitive cotton sector has consistently paid attractive prices for seed cotton, but failed to provide improved inputs or other services to support productivity enhancement among smallholder producers, with the result that the returns that they can achieve from cotton production are lower than in Africa’s other major producing countries. Since 2008 efforts have been made to introduce contract farming into the Tanzanian cotton sector in an attempt to rectify these deficiencies. Two models of contract farming have been promoted: the first focused on farmer business groups (until 2011/12) and the second focused on partnerships between ginning companies (i.e. processors of seed cotton) and local government authorities (piloted from 2013/14 and formalised since 2016/17). Successive presidents have backed these efforts, which have been welcomed by most farmer beneficiaries, but implementation has been fiercely resisted by a coalition of other ginning companies, MPs from the cotton growing regions and local councillors. This paper analyses the struggles over the introduction of contract farming under both Presidents Kikwete and Magufuli, seeking to shed light not just on the politics of agricultural policy making in Tanzania, but also on the evolving political settlement in the country from one administration to the next.