Private and state‐led contract farming in Zimbabwe: Accumulation, social differentiation and rural politics

Abstract

Contract farming schemes often amplify existing patterns of socio-economic differentiation. In Zimbabwe, processes of differentiation were underway before the current expansion of contract farming and they have deepened through the Fast Track Land Reform process. This article examines how pre-existing dynamics of differentiation shape the forms of contract farming adopted, as well as which groups of farmers gain access and on what terms. Social differentiation partly explains the outcomes of contract farming, even if contract farming in turn results in further differentiation. This article contrasts private sector-led contract farming of tobacco and state-led financing of maize production (the 'command agriculture' programme) in two high-potential sites and across different forms of land use. Unlike in many other settings, contract farming in Zimbabwe is highly influenced by the state, through the regulation of private sector arrangements and the establishment of a state-led contracting programme. The state-led programme boosted maize production amongst medium-scale farmers and resulted in an embedding of patronage relations. Meanwhile, the private-led contract farming has supported a widespread boom of tobacco production, mainly amongst smallholders. We find therefore that contract farming is

Twenty‐five years ofLiving Under Contract: Contract farming and agrarian change in the developing world

“…Contract farmers have responded by deploying a range of covert forms of resistance, including side-selling and strategic defaulting to level the otherwise skewed playing field. But more direct forms of confrontation have also been documented: Shonhe and Scoones (2022) disentangle the operation of contract farming in Zimbabwe as embedded in a context profoundly shaped by political relations and mediations, not least in the context of a redistributive land reform, where contract farming expands as a way to counter a crisis of finance unleashed by international sanctions. In a similar vein, Zhang and Zeng (2022) retrace the financial crisis and fiscal reform that have given rise to contract farming in the pig sector of the Sichuan Province as an adaptive strategy: the nature and impact of a fiscal reform has pushed highly-indebted large commercial farmers into producing under contract as a survival strategy, in a context in which smaller farmers are being displaced out of the sector and large farms can tap into alternative sources of funding to avoid contracting.…”

“…Papers in this special issue contribute to the study of the class dynamics in contract farming that complicate earlier analysis, also in Living Under Contract, of contract farmers as 'proletarians in disguise' or 'wage-labour equivalents'. The contract farmers in the Sichuanese hog sector are not family units, but middle-and large-scale firms that have come to replace the domestic pig breeders that used to produce the lion's share of output in the sector (Zhang & Zeng, 2022); the Zimbabwean land reform beneficiaries that participate in state-led maize contract farming are not directly investing their own labour power, instead they are politically connected cadres that hope to transition into an agrarian and entrepreneurial bourgeoisie (Shonhe & Scoones, 2022); in Mahrashtra, India, it is a group of 'middle farmers' who have been targeted by contract farming schemes, while rich households increasingly accumulate through non-farm activities (Cohen et al, 2022); and it is the 'Big Growers' in the Kilombero sugarcane scheme that accumulate capital through acquiring access to land and transform control over financial and productive resources into profits (Isager et al, 2022). The more we know about contract farming, the more we know about the various agrarian class structures in which it can operate and the more we understand about the ways in which it reinforces and reshapes social differentiation and class formation in the developing world.…”

Adoption intensity of a standardized technical system: The higher the better?—Evidence from China

“…However, studies in this area are rare. Tobacco is a critical crop its production is relatively labor-and technology-intensive, yet it is an important cash crop in many developing countries (Appau et al, 2020;Talukder et al, 2020;Wouter, 2020;Shonhe and Scoones, 2022). Dimara and Skuras (1998) investigated actors of the adoption of new varieties of flue-cured tobacco by farmers in Greece, and Omara et al (2021) analyzed views and factors of the adoption of rocket barn technology by farmers in Uganda.…”

Producing industrial pigs in southwestern China: The rise of contract farming as a coevolutionary process

“…Even when all capital comes from outside the local agriculture, there can still be vast differences in the political-economic characteristics of the capitalist class, their unequal relationships with small producers, and the institutional arrangements of CF, as so well-documented by contributions in this issue. Take, for example, the differences between the large-scale, vertically integrated transnational agribusinesses in India (Cohen, Vicol, & Pol, 2021), the informal traders in Java (White & Wijaya, 2021), Laos (Cole, 2021), and Mozambique (Veldwisch & Woodhouse, 2021), and the state-led "command agriculture" in Zimbabwe (Shonhe & Scoones, 2021). In addition to "capitalism from without," capitalism can also grow "from below" within local agriculture through the growth of petty commodity producers into commercial farmers, as shown in this issue in the case of rice and sugarcane growers in Tanzania (Greco, 2021;Isager, Fold, & Mwakibete, 2021).…”