Paper short abstract:

This paper will scrutinise the development of state farms in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah’s state capitalism. Central aims of state farms were to promote modern agricultural production and create waged labour employment in rural areas.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on an important yet neglected chapter of Ghana's history of independence: the development of state farms under Kwame Nkrumah. State farms were designed to decrease agricultural imports, increase agricultural exports besides cocoa, and demonstrate the superiority of modern and technological agriculture. Besides those agronomic and political goals, state farms were also designed to prevent rural to urban migration, seen as a central cause of the unemployment problem of the new nation.

State farms commenced their work in 1962. Two years later there were already 112 farms in Ghana, each of which employed between 100 and 500 workers. The farms were progressive in introducing formalised waged labour into agriculture, and by 1965 the total number of state farm employees reached 18.000. Yet, the ambitious project was short lived and ceased with Nkrumah's fall. Explanations for the failure remain vague, due to the lack of systematic analysis.

The development of state farms has been largely ignored in historiography. Agronomic studies of the 60s and 70s have focused on state farms, but seldom analysed political aspects of it.

This paper will analyse the position of state farms within the political and economic history in the 1960s and within Nkrumah's socialism. Central topics are the organisation of state farms and their agricultural production. With respect to the goal of preventing rural flight, the paper will have a special focus on labour employment at the farms.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will provide an in-depth look at the Liberian government's "Operation Production" between 1963-70, which was a clarion call for an increase in national rice production to bolster the country’s level of food self-sufficiency for greater economic self-reliance, as well as farmers’ respones.

Paper long abstract:

In 1963, in the midst of a major debt crisis, President William Tubman of Liberia launched "Operation Production", a clarion call for an increase in national rice production to bolster the country's level of food self-sufficiency for greater economic self-reliance. While most rural Liberians regularly engaged in subsistence rice farming, surplus production was limited. Therefore, those living in the urban capital of Monrovia were forced to rely on regular rice imports from abroad. Tubman did not only announce Operation Production in front of the legislature, but personally travelled to the rural areas to spread this message to the wider population; and successfully so as it caught the attention of many small-scale or grass roots farmers. Nevertheless, as Operation Production began to shape policy in a concrete manner, the precise path to food self-sufficiency remained relatively obscure for most Liberians, causing conflict between aspirational small farmers and the large-scale planters who were in need of cheap and even compulsory labor (aided by revised vagrancy laws, for instance). This paper will examine Operation Production in the context of Liberia's "unification" (or, rural integration) policy, which represented a broader developmental vision, whilst taking the wider global Cold War politics that generated such projects into account. It will illuminate some of the inherent contradictions that existed in the rally call, which summoned all Liberian farmers to action, yet, the governmental structures that were put into place only supported a successful few.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Ghana's twin agrarian questions -- the trajectory of agricultural productivity and the transition (or not) to large-scale private ownership in the countryside -- with emphasis upon the issue of transfers of capital from cocoa farming to manufacturing and other urban activities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines Ghana's twin agrarian questions, the potential for transformation of agricultural productivity and the trajectory - or otherwise - towards a capitalist countryside, through the lens of cocoa farming, the sector which, over the 'long twentieth century', c.1890-2011, has been usually the country's biggest foreign exchange earner and the primary field for accumulation by small and medium-scale indigenous enterprise. By the 1990s it was common to associate cocoa farming with static productivity and inequality without class differentiation: thus, no agrarian transition. It is argued that this view is exaggerated and misleading, in the light of recent research on the Ghana's three cocoa-planting booms, including the relatively neglected one of the 1990s and early 2000s. Particular attention is given to the issues of change in techniques of production, the continued lack of advantages of scale in cocoa production, the multiplication of population, the economics and politics of rural-urban transfers, and the highly contingent history of small capitalist farmers' capacity to organise themselves collectively. It is argued that the relatively rapid and sustained economic growth of the country between the start of Structural Adjustment in 1983 and the beginning of oil exports in 2011 featured a set of changes which, in combination, re-open the possibility of agrarian transition in Ghana, both in productivity and social organisation.

Paper short abstract:

This papers focuses on Nigeria and relates the changes and transformation of production in agriculture and the pace of social and economic changes that accompanied state intervention, and the developments that came in the wake of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the development of the petroleum industry.

Paper long abstract:

The history of African agriculture in the twentieth century was one of growth and prosperity followed by decline and crisis. At the outset of the century, the agricultural sector was demographically large, wealthier and more productive than the rest of the economy. By the close of the century, the agricultural sector had become demographically small, relatively poor and less productive than any time before. Farmers at the end of the century had declining income and economic disparity with those who did not farm. The key to this change was structural, demographic and ecological. This papers focuses on Nigeria and relates the changes and transformation of production in agriculture and the pace of social and economic changes that accompanied state intervention, and the developments that came in the wake of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the development of the petroleum industry. While the agricultural economy was in serious decline by the 1970s, the development of the petroleum industry exacerbated the crisis. As oil export and revenue increased, the overall importance of agriculture continued to decrease. The dependency on petroleum revenue had negative effects on the rural areas because of the neglect of the agricultural sector and the high rate of urban migration that it generated. The situation continued into the 1990s, thereby decreasing the quality of urban and rural life. The importance of the economic "boom and bust" cycles and their effect on rural dwellers influenced the conditions of peasants and prompted the divergent paths they took in response to agricultural and general economic decline.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes an emerging conflict between Mozambican female cassava traders and NGOs, state agencies, and firms seeking to commodify this starchy staple for production of a commercial beer. Women's battle reveals the limits of the "Green Revolution" model for African agricultural development.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, persistently high hunger rates in rural Mozambique have catalyzed the rise of public-private partnerships and donor-funded agricultural "value chains" as leading instruments for enhancing food security. According to the "Green Revolution" model for African agricultural development, participation in value chains will raise smallholder farmer incomes through commercialization of key crops, access to "improved" inputs, and strengthened markets; new income will in turn enable the purchase of more healthy food for rural families. Yet such initiatives underestimate not only the complexity of the food system they seek to change, but the gendered histories that shape farmer decision-making on the ground. In Inhambane, a high-profile cassava value chain spearheaded by the South African brewer SABMiller,* its subsidiary Cervejas de Moçambique, and the Dutch company DADTCO, has stumbled for precisely these reasons since its launch in 2013. Seeking to transform the starchy tuber from a food staple to a raw material for the world's first cassava-based commercial beer, value chain proponents have overlooked the social meanings of a crop women have grown and exchanged for over a century. They also failed to anticipate the spirited reaction of female cassava traders, or maguevas, who since the 1980s have been transporting and selling the area's cassava to Inhambane migrants in Maputo, and who are battling to preserve this rural-urban trade. Drawing on oral interviews, survey data, and archival research, the paper offers an historical perspective on this conflict and its implications for Green Revolution-inspired plans to "modernize" smallholder agriculture.