Agricultural Commercialization And its Impact on Land Tenure Relations in The Nanumba North District

ABSTRACT

The focus of recent literature is on land grabbing through international investment in African agriculture has attracted much attention in the media but overlooks the processes of social differentiation in rural communities, which is also resulting in processes of accumulation of large expanses of farmland by emerging commercial farmers. There are multiple pathways by which agricultural commercialization and land consolidation can occur. This study explored emergent land markets within rural areas and the impact of agricultural commercialization on various forms of land transactions and labour relations, and the extent to which this results in the dispossession of smallholder farmers in the Nanumba North District. Appropriation of agricultural land can occur through accumulation from (1) below, by investments of smallholder farmers within a process of investing farm profits in further expansion of farming activities. It can also occur from (2) above, by investments of other actors who have accumulated capital outside of agriculture into agriculture, which they see as a profitable venture. Farmland appropriations can also occur through (3) rental markets, neo-customary and informal mechanisms based on notions of a moral economy rooted in reciprocity, obligations, exchange of services and gifts, and debt. This thesis argues that, the main source of accumulation within agriculture occurs from investments of traders, civil servants, bureaucrats who use their savings to gain access to farmlands. The research employed both quantitative and qualitative methods of data gathering. The sample size was sixty farmers which comprised of twenty commercial farmers, fifteen women, and ten labourers as well as fifteen small-scale farmers. The findings revealed that the new path ways in which people accumulate agriculture land from poor farmers is through the hiring of tractors and providing ploughing services to land owners in exchange for land which reveals that land owners lack the necessary capital to hire tractor services. The study concludes that majority of the farmers who have tractors were civil servants who accumulated their capital from non-farm activities and use this to influence land owners to appropriate vast expanse of farmlands through the provision of ploughing v services and hiring out of tractors. It is recommended that government facilitates access to market agricultural services such as tractor ploughing for smallholders, ensuring that these are widely available and not controlled by a class of aspiring large-scale farmers with political connections.