Presentation short abstract

Elite women’s investments in land in Mali reshape labor relations, creating systems that mix empowerment with exploitation. Relying on underpaid rural women’s work, these investments fuel eco-precarity, amid land commodification, and reinforce inequalities while creating new forms of exploitation.

Presentation long abstract

This study examines how elite women’s investments in peri-urban agriculture around Bamako, Mali, restructure agrarian labor relations and replicate new forms of precarity within the agribusiness sector. As urban extension transforms agricultural frontiers into spaces of speculative and prolific investment, the access of urban female elites into land markets produces hybrid labor systems that blur the line between empowerment and exploitation. While these women investors are often perceived as agents of women’s empowerment and the modern agricultural revolution, their farming activities heavily rely on underpaid and informal rural labor, mainly that of women displaced from customary plots.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Baguinéda and Sélingué, the paper locates peri-urban farming within broader practices of capitalist accumulation, neoliberal agrarian policy, and land commodification. It contends that the gendered reconfiguration of agricultural labor establishes a form of “eco-precarity” (Neimark et al., 2020), where sustainability and food security discourses disguise persistent discriminations in access to land, income, and decision-making. Through the lens of elite capture (Warren & Visser, 2016), the analysis assesses how rural women navigate these evolving labor regimes, both as evicted farmers and as workers seeking to regain agency within elite-controlled agricultural areas.

By exploring the intersection of class, gender in environmental governance, this study furthers to grasp how green labor frontiers in Mali reproduce unequal power relationships while also creating new sites of contestation, solidarity, and potential counter-politics among the rural marginalize workers.