Following the Briefing in the last issue of ROAPE, this Debates contribution again uses Senegalese evidence to explore the interests and actions of major participants in the struggle to transform African agriculture: government, national elites, peasants and their civil society allies. The first section examines government motivations in facilitating land grabs; the second reviews a seminal land grab case in the Senegal River Valley that illustrates the growing sophistication of the peasant pushback and the emergence of an anti-land grab coalition between civil society and peasant organisations.
In an impressive attempt to guarantee food security, well over two billion dollars have been invested in the modernization of the agrarian economy in the Senegal River Valley. But, even though two huge dams and thousands of village-based irrigation schemes have been constructed since the late 1970s, food security is still as illusive as ever. This study attempts to explain why. In doing so it focuses on the impact of donor-dominated macro-structural change on gender and class relations. This analytical perspective has two benefits: First, it reveals the risks posed by foreign domination of development programs for different segments of the rural population. Second, it points to a critical element in a new approach to improving farm productivity and food security�-�improving women's access to land and technology.Foreign aid, structural adjustment, food security, women's land rights, inequality, JEL Codes: N57, Q01,
Neoclassical models characterize agricultural households as unified production/consumptionunits in which labor is allocated according to principles of comparative advantage, income is pooled, and preferences for consumption and leisure are shared. This paper demonstrates that the assumptions and structure of both recursive and simultaneous agricultural household models are strikingly inconsistent with evidence from agricultural households in southern Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa. Fundamental revisions in the modeling of economic choice structures within agricultural households are required if men's and women's economic behavior is to be appropriately understood and reliably predicted. A Marxian analysis of the social relations of production within households can contribute to this process and can also indicate important new directions for agricultural policy analysis.
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