Institute of African Studies

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    When agricultural commercialization fails: ‘Re-visiting’ value-chain agriculture and its ruins in northern Ghana
    (Globalizations, 2022) Iddrisu, A.Y.; Yaro, J.A.; Ouma, S.
    Commercialization via value-chain agriculture, under which small farmers often Collaborating with big companies has become a prominent development strategy across Africa. Often framed in win-win terms, the dark sides of such projects (e.g. project failures and related losses are often sidelined in both academic and practitioner discourses on agricultural commercialization. Informed by a collaborative ethnography of a failed value-chain agriculture project in Ghana, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how farmers, agribusiness companies and development organizations engage with and shape commercialization processes, and how those most affected—farmers and their communities—experience often risky and conflict-prone ventures. In contrast to the win-win-rhetoric adopted by funders and corporations partners in such projects, we foreground the uneven distribution of risk and sacrifices and losses between farmers, communities, and corporate partners; the socially and materially disruptive nature of commercialization projects for host communities; and the clashes between a planner’s view of the world and the environmental realities of commercialization.
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    Tractors, states, markets and agrarian change in Africa
    (Taylor & Francis Group, 2022) Cabral, L.; Amanor, K.S.
    Mechanisation has made a comeback to agricultural policy in Africa, encouraging scholars to revisit seminal literature on induced innovation. Recent studies emphasise the role for markets in addressing Africa’s mechanisation gaps and warn about past government failures to be avoided. The trust in the ability of markets to offer optimal solutions is debatable. Markets are shaped, as states are, by the interests of their most powerful players. A history-informed analysis of mechanisation and agrarian change in Africa sheds light onto how states and markets are co-constituted. The much-hyped rise in demand of tractors by medium-scale farmers can be linked back to earlier government intervention. And today’s public-private partnerships for mechanisation services illustrate how private interests shape public policy. Top-down tractor programmes continue to largely bypass smallholder farmers, though some are able to benefit. Though tractors are only one element of a complex story of agrarian change in Africa, they illustrate the enduring process of commodification of land, farming and agrarian relations that benefits the few and subjugates the many.