Peasant agriculture in Africa

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Goran Hyden
Keyword(s):  
Peasant Agriculture

subsistence production (where in the colonial period mainly extra-economic factors such as forced cultivation or forced labour caused the integration of the peasantry in the market exchange). Socialist development was there-fore strongly identified with modernising through the rapid expansion of the state sector, that is, nationalisation and mechanisation on an ever-increasing scale. The peasantry would be gradually absorbed within this expanding sector, and hence, at first, the role of the peasantry was seen as essentially passive with its transformation mainly centring on social aspects. As such, the policy of communal villages became virtually a habitational concept (and was in actual fact the responsibility of the national directorate of housing): a question of social infrastructures (water supplies, schools, etc.) within a concept of communal life without concerning production and its transformation. This view conflicted heavily with the objective conditions in the rural areas characterised by a deep involvement of the peasantry in market relationships and their dependence on it either as suppliers of labour power or as cash crop producers. This contradiction became more obvious, when the balance of payments became a real constraint (in 1979) and, hence, the question of financing accumulation cropped up more strongly in practice. The peasantry as suppliers of cash crops, of food and of labour power to the state sectors occupied a crucial position in production and accumulation. However, the crucial question then becomes whether the peasantry only performs the role of supplying part of the accumulation fund or whether the peasantry itself is part and parcel of the process of transformation and hence that accumulation embraces as an integral part the transformation of peasant agriculture into more socialised forms of production. In other words, it poses the question whether the strategy is based on a primitive socialist accumulation on the basis of the peasantry (transferring the agrarian surplus to the develop-ment of the state sector), or whether accumulation includes the transformation of peasant agriculture. Clearly, the way this question is posed in practice will influence heavily the nature of the organisation of the exchange between the state sector and the peasantry. The proposition that the state sector can develop under its own steam (with or without the aid of external borrowing) cannot bypass this crucial question since, on the one hand, a considerable part of foreign exchange earnings and of the food supply to the towns depended on peasant production and, on the other, the very conditions of productivity and profitability in the agrarian state sector depended heavily on the organic link that existed.between labour supply and family agriculture. The monetary disequilibrium originating from the state sector has a severe impact on the organisation of the exchange between the state sector and the peasantry. First, the imbalance between the demand for and the supply of consumer commodities affected rural areas differently from urban areas. The reason was that in urban areas the rationing system guaranteed to each family a minimum quantity of basic consumer necessities at official prices. In the rural areas the principal form of rationing remained the queue! Hence, forced savings were distributed differently over urban and rural areas. Furthermore, the concentration of resources on the state sector also implied that the peasants'

2013 ◽  
pp. 205-205
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sector ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Peasant Agriculture ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas ◽  
Labour Power

scholarly journals PRODUCTION INTERRELATIONSHIPS IN SRI LANKAN PEASANT AGRICULTURE

1987 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Richard Shumway ◽  
Kandiah Jegasothy ◽  
William P. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Peasant Agriculture
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document