Paper short abstract:

This proposal aims to study Cameroonian rice farmer's resistance to various crises they are facing throughout conflicts and the question of the sustainability of the first so-called "modernization" project of rice cultivation in the country.

Paper long abstract:

More than five decades after the creation of the SEMRY (Société d'Expansion et de Modernization de la Riziculture de Yagoua) its objective of food self-sufficiency in Cameroon and the Lake Chad Basin has remained an utopia. Despite the creation of infrastructures, the local assets and the active participation of population, the locality has become a field of confrontations. The national market is dominated by imported rice and the vulnerability of some rice farmers who are struggling to meet their basic needs is increasing. Moreover, the degradation of local agro-ecosystems and the natural disasters of the last two decades raise questions in terms of the impact of the hydro-rice project on social actors. Analyze the sustainability of the SEMRY program in this context of confrontations which generates resistance but also a reflection on the criteria for evaluating such sustainability is the main objective of this paper. We use a sustainability analysis grid inspired by the work of Adamczewski & al. (2011, 2012) and Garambois & al. (2018), distinguishing the three usual dimensions of the sustainability on the economic, environmental and social levels. The production of data involves a systemic approach, linking observations, individual and collective interviews, and consultations of archives and institutional documents in order to emphasize the trajectories of vulnerabilities, the various conflicts linked to the project and the sustainability of the livelihoods of the SEMRY rice farmers.