‘Adversely Incorporated yet Moving up the Social Ladder?’: Labour Migrants Shifting the Gaze from Agricultural Investment Chains to ‘Care Chains’ in Capitalist Social Reproduction in Senegal

Abstract

In Senegal, the growth of horticulture has been particularly rapid in the last decade or so, partly coinciding with the 2007–2008 ‘land rush’ and a boom in agricultural investment. This article analyses the implications of the rise in foreign direct investment (FDI) in the horticultural sector in northern Senegal. Specifically, it examines FDI’s effects on labour migration and the social reproduction of rural classes of labour through an intersectional feminist and gendered lens. It argues that invisibilised ‘care chains’ that overly burden women, and communities of solidarities, play a crucial role in the social reproduction of horticultural workers, most specifically migrant workers, and provide a subsidy to agrarian capital. Yet, capitalist development does not always translate to better wages and more inclusive laws and policies for horticultural wage workers and providers of caring labour who are adversely incorporated in these political economies. As a result, this requires further attention from policy-makers and political leaders. Using a combination of working-life histories and survey data gathered through two rounds of fieldwork over two years, and secondary data from relevant databases, this article focuses on the River Valley Region and Louga to analyse the emerging challenges of labour migration, social reproduction and caring labour in rural Senegal.

‘Land for my children’: Gendered moral economies, social reproduction and resistance against land grabs in rural Cambodia

“…Based on these arguments, this study makes three key contributions to feminist perspectives of land grabbing. First, it builds and extends the significant body of scholarship on large‐scale land acquisitions that maps the impact of dispossession on gendered division of labour in households and communities, women's employment opportunities and the relationship between unpaid care work and paid agricultural work (Dieng, 2022; Gironde et al, 2021; Joshi, 2020; Levien, 2017). These studies capture the processes through which dispossession and shrinking access to private and communal lands put pressure on women's reproductive activities such as increasing the time spent on food and fuel provision, as well as the devaluation of women's work in plantations and local labour markets (see also Stevano, 2022).…”

The social reproduction of agrarian change: Feminist political economy and rural transformations in the global south. An introduction

“…Resistance, in these contexts, is not merely embedded in 'traditional' beliefs; rather these beliefs are strategically invoked for struggles centring the social reproduction of the peasant household. Notably, through this contribution, debates on social reproduction in/and agrarian contexts are also powerfully reconnected to socialist ecofeminist analyses (including by Barca, 2020), and in conversation with other feminist studies of land grabs (like by Gironde et al, 2021or Dieng, 2022.…”

Green Agendas and White Markets: The Coloniality of Agroecology in Senegal

“…At the turn of the 20th century, the French Colonial Administration introduced market gardening in the Niayes area and cultivated new crops such as cabbage, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots, and eggplants. This sector would develop significantly during the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s for reasons connected to the availability of water and labor migrants from other parts of the country [113][114][115][116].…”

“…In the frame of the PGs, sharecropping is banned informally because executive members of the leading non-governmental organisations were afraid sharecroppers would use chemicals to boost the yields that are their payment; hence sharecropping is banned for the sake of protecting the purity of the products. 4 International migration is commonly linked to social (upwards) mobility reflected in the saying: "Tukki, Tekki, Tedd, Teral" which translates into "travelling, making it, succeeding socially, and helping family and friends" Sall 2011 cited in [116] and is therefore quite positively perceived in the Senegalese society. The perspective of accumulating relative wealth abroad and being able to accommodate the family upon return shapes the dreams and aspirations of many young men and reflects in many conversations in everyday life [144].…”