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1、ECAS 20093rd European Conference on African StudiesLeipzig, 4 to 7 June 2009Panel 126: Dynamics of disintegration and collapse: African Societies facing hunger, violence and migrationExternal interventions and the dynamics of change in agrarian societies in Africa Ana Larcher Carvalhoanacatarinalarc
2、her1. IntroductionThe combined effects of a food price variations and a global economic crisis have, once again, raised concerns about massive increases of food insecurity and hunger in Africa. The new “food crisis” in Africa is not new: it has been discussed since the 1960s and the early 1970s. In
3、general terms, Africa has continued to sustain a high level of population growth at the same time as per capita food production has declined or stagnated. Already in the 1970s there was evidence and fear of the growth of food insecurity in Africa leading to famines (Dumont, 1962). After a period of
4、growth in the 1950s and 1960s, per capita yields have declined from the 1970s onwards. African agriculture continues to demonstrate very low rates while rural poverty increases (Bryceson, 2007)Many economically viable countries suffer from food deficits, and regularly import to make up the differenc
5、e. In the case of Africa, however, the situation is different because, in the absence of industrialisation, there are no productive alternatives for agriculture and no other source of foreign exchange to pay for imports. A major consequence has been the increasing role for external food aid at the s
6、ame time as it has declined in the rest of the world” (Duffield, 1991). However, there may be a difference with this new food crisis in that some authors believe that agrarian societies have been depleted and are running out of coping (survival) strategies due to the cumulative effects of larger tha
7、n normal gaps in production, drought or conflict, combined with high prices of cereals in the international markets. In addition, the external factors are controlled by actors, mechanisms and events that are, to varying degrees, largely outside the influence of the people and governments concerned,
8、and those most impacted (WFP, ).Due to this crisis there are, at present, international calls to increase funding and external intervention in the agricultural sector The EU and the UN set up a “food facility” and aid package of 1 billion (FAO, 2009). . Further intervention, however, should be based
9、 on an analysis of the process of change in African agrarian societies and on the cumulative impact of external interventions. Development interventions act within African agrarian societies to transform them. However, because of a lack of understanding about the processes of change these societies
10、are undergoing, the interventions often fail to produce the development they target.Transformation of African agrarian societies has been a continuous process of adaptation to local conditions, including climate, environment, demography and social and cultural changes but it has to be understood in
11、the context of political and economic change at a larger scale. Major global changes over the past few decades have sharply accelerated the pace of change in agrarian societies. These have been driven by the hegemony of neo-liberalism and growing interconnectedness of economies and societies, throug
12、h international aid, trade, policy and other rules that govern international economy (Piciotto, 2007) resulting in more risks, uncertainties and complexity. These global changes have generated new kinds of agrarian dynamics and relationships in the African continent (Hammar, 2007). These processes o
13、f change - complex, fluid and fuzzy - are not well understood. The aim of this research is to examine them more closely and attempt to clarify the relationships between external interventions and change in agrarian societies. The tools to analyse these complex processes of change are still lacking a
14、nd the aim of this research is to contribute to the development of a model to better understand the dynamic process of agrarian societal change. We propose to approach the problem from a perspective of flow analysis, in which the reciprocal influences are translated into flows which may be financial
15、, informational, of goods and technology, of people, etc. To understand the impacts of external interventions we want to follow the flow of external interventions from outside the country to government level and to the agrarian society level.This paper aims to contribute to the elaboration of an ana
16、lysis framework for the dynamics of of agrarian societies facing global change, focusing on agriculture. It starts by analysing changes occurring in two spheres of this continuous flow, the urban sphere and the agrarian level, trying to identify inflows and outflows and examining their relationships
17、 to external dynamics. The research also seeks to produce knowledge to inform the process of planning and evaluating (or stopping) foreign aid interventions in Africa. 2. Agrarian change theories and methodsUnderstanding the problem requires an examination of how change has been studies in African a
18、grarian societies and how models have changed. There is a vast scholarship from various fields/disciplines approaching the problem from different perspectives, scales and timeframes. The various processes that shape agrarian change in Africa are complex. Traditionally they have been analysed from an
19、 analytical (and political) and historical-materialistic tradition (“the Agrarian Question” commoditisation, rural class formation, transitions to capitalism). This tradition has paid close attention to patterns of commoditisation of peasant production and processes of accumulation in colonial and i
20、ndependent Africa, as well as to “household forms, agrarian labour processes, technical change, rural labour markets, patterns of migration and demography, processes of class differentiation in the countryside and rural politics” (Bernstein and Byers 2001, 37). New themes and approaches in the study
21、 of agrarian change But alternative approaches from anthropology, human geography, political ecology, environmental history have challenged previous ones and generated important knowledge, addressing questions such as identity and place-making, modes of exclusion and belonging, multiple regimes of a
22、uthority, resource competition and environmental violence, state formation and nation building. (Hammar, 2007, report from the research forum, New Agrarian Questions In Africa , Research Forum at the Nordic Africa Institute, 4 May 2007) Alternative concepts for dealing with agrarian change include l
23、ivelihoods strategies, and coping strategies, food (in)security and vulnerability. Livelihood strategies are the daily strategies people adopt to make a living, and they can be used to show how livelihood priorities change over a life course (de Haan & Zoomers, 2005). Sustainable Livelihoods, emphas
24、ises the long-term durability of livelihood strategies. The approach incorporates to concepts of vulnerability, the political economy of agrarian change, and the different institutions through which livelihoods take place, such as land tenure arrangements, gender relations, and customary obligations
25、 (Scoones, 1998; Chambers & Conway, 1992). Coping strategies have attracted attention especially in the 1990s (de Waal, 1987; 1990; Swift, 1989). They are either modifications or extensions of the normal livelihood strategy, in conditions of extreme hardship and stress. In response to food insecurit
26、y, agrarian societies adopt a variety of coping strategies to reduce the impact of food shortage (Campbell 1987, 1988; Fleuret 1986; Zinyama et al. 1988). In some cases the distinction between livelihoods strategies and coping strategies cannot be made because the line between adaptation to change a
27、nd adaptation to stress is unclear (Duffield, 1991).Coping strategies are complex, involving a variety of decisions to preserve assets. These strategies differ from one society to another, depending on their asset base and, within societies their use can be differentiated by gender, age and economic
28、 status. Due to the instability of semi-subsistence, coping strategies evolve and change over time (Duffield,1991). Other authors developed frameworks to study the dynamics of rural change under global change. Leichenko and OBrien (2001) used the concept of dynamic vulnerability which they define as
29、 follows: “vulnerability is a dynamic characteristic that is influenced by larger scale economic and environmental changes. It is the extent to which environmental and economic changes influence the capacity of regions, sectors, ecosystems, and social groups to respond to various types of natural an
30、d socio-economic shocks. Dynamic vulnerability incorporates traditional notions of vulnerability, but places these notions within a rapidly changing socioeconomic and environmental context a context that transforms the static snapshots of vulnerability. In other words, dynamic vulnerability consider
31、s how global and macro-scale changes are being played out at regional and local scales, including the effects that these changes have on traditional measures of vulnerability. Dynamic vulnerability takes into consideration the linkages between global-scale processes and local processes, both in term
32、s of impacts and interactions”In search of a new analytical frameworkThere is a view that “we need to combine a political-economy approach with historical and anthropological perspectives” (Lenz, 2007 in Hammar 2007). However, “all this, of course, has its tensions: between general themes and useful
33、 empirical generalisation, on one hand, and doing justice to historical specificity and diverse experiences, on the other; between continuity and change, with the challenges of understanding their dialectic; between distinguishing and demarcating the agrarian and connecting it with broader social re
34、lations and dynamics of which it is part” (Bernstein, 2007). The question Henry Bernstein asks is whether we “open to analytical complementarities in some shape or form? If so, how might we go about constructing, applying, testing and developing them?” (Hammar, 2007)This research proposes to integra
35、te different perspectives of agrarian change. It combines existing analyses of the overall changes in agrarian systems in developing countries at a global scale (Hornborg 2005, Grigg 2002, FAO 2003), with finer grained analyses focussing on agrarian societies. This research also aims at understandin
36、g the change multiple interventions are producing on a given territory (Schiefer, 2008). In a given territory, there are now a wide number of intervention agencies, multinational and bilateral, NGOs, associations, etc. It is therefore necessary to consider the cumulative impact of all those interven
37、tions. It is this integrated framework which may allow us to analyse in depth the interactions between global changes and change in agrarian societies.The challenge is also in analysing the complex interrelations between the external and internal “drivers of change”. These interactions lead to very
38、rapid processes of social changes which we do not have the mechanisms to understand. “Understanding very complex assemblages of land use and social change in places strongly affected by economic, climatic, and social changes is becoming one of the key methodological challenges for the natural and so
39、cial sciences” (Batterbury, 2007).We propose to define the problem from a perspective of flow analysis, in which the reciprocal influences are translated into flows which may be financial, informational, of goods and technology, of people, etc. In the case of African societies and global dynamics, t
40、he internal and global flows are of totally different natures and this difference produces instability and turbulence. The zone of turbulence is a grey area where these flows, internal and external, of different speeds and dimensions, in constant movement, meet, interact and create unexpected effect
41、s. The mechanisms of interaction are fuzzy and complex and not well investigated. These zones of turbulence are located at the interfaces between global flows and internal flows. Analysing dynamics from this perspective provides information about some of the mechanisms of interaction between global
42、dynamics and African societies that otherwise would be remain invisible (Schiefer et al., 2009. research proposal). This paper aims to contribute to the definition of the analysis framework by analysing changes occurring in two spheres of this continuous flow, the urban sphere and the agrarian level
43、, trying to identify inflows and outflows and examining their relationships to external dynamics. It starts by examining some of the changes occurring in agrarian societies, trying to identify what has changed in their productive and social organization and how change is related to external interven
44、tion. 3. Historical perspective on externally-induced changeChange in African agrarian societies is a long historical process greatly influenced by externally-induced changed. Despite its late colonization, Africa entered slowly, even if unevenly (West Africa has been most affected), into the world
45、economy through slave trade and colonialism. The process of change continued after independence with the development state through to the movements of globalization and neo-liberalism. To understand agrarian change currently, it is important to examine the main transformations that occurred througho
46、ut history because many of the contemporary models of development are close to failed models of the past. “Unless design teams study the global experience of rural projects in historical perspective, they may unwittingly repeat some of the same mistakes that were made” (Eisher, 2003). The processes
47、of agrarian change, from the point of view of external intervention, can be examined through several periods: colonialism, 1880s-1950s; independence and the modernization project 1960s-1970s; structural adjustment, 1980s-1990s (after Bernstein and Woodhouse, 2001; Berry, 2002); Present post 1990s.1.
48、1. Colonialism and commoditization of agricultureAfrica had been drawn into the world economy through the supply of slaves for work in Americas plantations. In the late 19th century, when the colonial state was established, the changes to come in African societies were shaped by the expansion of agr
49、icultural exports (Bernstein, 1992). The colonial administration organized labour and land with the objective of producing raw materials (particularly materials for vegetable oils for processing) for metropolitan needs and for the operation of the administration (Bernstein, 1992). It ensured connection with the world market through taxations, transport and some aspects of marketing and credit. Key links were dominated by giant commercial co
