Value is Still Labour: Exploitation and the Production of Environmental Rent and Commodities for Nature Tourists in Rural Senegal

Monetary incentives such as nature-based tourism and payment for ecosystem service (PES) mechanisms have become increasingly promoted as a means for protecting the environment. Critical scholars are interpreting these developments as forms of accumulation based upon the commodification of nature, prosumption and institutional power that make labour progressively irrelevant in the production of value. Drawing on the case of two Senegalese villages and on Marx's concepts of commodity and value, this paper suggests that such perspectives are inaccurate and that they serve to silence workers’ experiences of exploitation in these contexts. The paper proposes to go beyond generalising conceptualisations of the green economy such as “accumulation by conservation” and to be specific about the ways in which production and therefore working conditions relate to capital accumulation. It distinguishes between nature-based tourism and PES mechanisms: the former a profit-driven commodity production process, the latter a means for depoliticising environmental problems associated to capitalist commodity production through the payment of an environmental or climate rent that does not generate any value. Through this perspective it shows how in rural Senegal villagers’ working day needs to be long, intense and poorly rewarded to reduce PES project costs and facilitate the extraction of surplus value by owners of nature-based tourism businesses as well as how labour hierarchies go hand in hand with relations of exploitation between workers. Capitalists, donors and local intermediaries’ ability to take advantage of workers’ labour is facilitated by the agrarian crises that capital has generated in these Senegalese villages, but it is also contested as workers rise up against exploitation. Capital's ability to survive to its own ecological contradictions therefore rests upon workers’ shoulders and not exclusively on the formation of class hegemonies.