Rwanda: an agrarian developmental state?

Abstract

This article investigates Rwanda’s agricultural policies and institutions as a historically contextualised response to exceptionally adverse developmental circumstances. Using the agrarian question as an analytical point of reference, the article argues that it is extremely difficult to identify how increases in productivity and income in smallholder agriculture can be achieved without forceful state action and a sustained injection of resources. In light of this, entirely right-congruent governance is caught in a dilemma about the extent to which the government overrides peasants’ own agency and the extent to which the agrarian strategy produces a sustained and stable transformation in agriculture. Rather than making a defence or condemnation of the government’s strategy, the article argues against pre-emptive judgements of an agrarian strategy that can only discernibly attain success over a long period. What the article does do is insist that there is development potential in the current strategy, not simply a disaster in the making.

Keywords:

• Rwanda
• agrarian question
• developmental state
• governance

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the interviewees in Rwanda, who were very generous with their time. I am also very grateful for referees’ comments.

Notes

1. Akram-Lodhi and Kay, “Surveying the Agrarian Question,” 257.

2. Akram-Lodhi and Kay go on to identify seven distinct formulations of the agrarian question. See also Bernstein, “Agrarian Questions Then and Now.”

3. Vogel, “The Tragedy of History”; Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism; and Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing. It is no coincidence that some of the best research on the causes and dynamics of civil war are analyses of crises in agrarian social relations.

4. Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing.

5. Bernstein, “Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’.”

6. Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression.

7. Newbury and Newbury, “Bringing the Peasants Back In.”

8. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis; and Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.

9. Newbury, “Returning Refugees.”

10. Newbury, “Returning refugees,” 270ff. The DRC was at the time the recently independent Republic of the Congo, later renamed Zaire (1971) by President Mobutu. It became the DRC in 1997.

11. The notion of ‘Hutu power’ returned ominously in the build-up to the genocide.

12. Verwimp, Peasants in Power.

13. Uvin, “Difficult Choices.”

14. Andre and Platteau, “Land Relations under Unbearable Stress.”

15. de Lame, A Hill among a Thousand.

16. Chossudovsky, Globalization of Poverty; and Storey, “Structural Adjustment.”

17. Storey, “Economics and Ethnic Conflict,” 49.

18. Lonsdale, “Moral Ethnicity and Political Tribalism.” Detailed accounts of this period tend to portray Habyarimana as losing power to a political elite based in the northwest, focused around the city of Gisenyi and the social affinities of Mme Agathe Habyarimana, the president’s wife.

19. One manifestation of this was the fact that, as men were mobilised to kill, leaders would often deploy agrarian metaphors about work and cutting. Although guns were distributed throughout the country, the main weapon of the genocide was the iconic farming tool, the machete. The ‘work’ metaphor came out in the narratives of former génocidaires in Hatzfield, Machete Season.

20. The genocide commenced in Kigali with the killings of the politically liberal Hutu elite and Tutsi people in general.

21. Hatzfield, Machete Season; and Straus, The Order of Genocide. Interahamwe is variously translated from Kinyarwanda – usually as ‘those who hunt together’ – and refers to the genocidal militias.

22. Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards.

23. Andre and Platteau, “Land Relations under Unbearable Stress.”

24. Relatedly, see Hickey, “Beyond ‘Poverty Reduction’.”

25. Golooba-Mutebi, The Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa, 2; and van Hoywegen, “The Urgency,” 354.

26. Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards, 109.

27. In the years after the genocide aid to Rwanda was fairly limited and in fact more resources were probably going to the refugee camps in the DRC and therefore to some degree to the remaining génocidaire militias.

28. Marysse et al., “The Aid ‘Darlings’ and ‘Orphans’”; and Uvin, “Difficult Choices.”

29. Gacaca is a neo-traditional open-hearing process that aimed to process those suspected of participating in the genocide through confessionals, testament and decisions by locally selected judges. The best overview of Gacaca’s fortunes is Clark, The Gacaca Courts; and Clark, “Negotiating Reconciliation in Rwanda.”

30. Huggins, “Land Grabbing and Land Tenure Security”; and Kimanuka, Sub-Saharan Africa’s Development Challenges. At times Singapore was referred to analogously, and the president from 2000 onwards, Paul Kagame, was personally influence by the writings of Lee Kwan Yew.

31. IFAD, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 2.

32. The percentage of those living in absolute poverty declined from 56.7% to 44.9% between 2006/7 and 2010/11 and there was a reduction in the Gini coefficient from 0.52 to 0.49. UNDP, Rwanda, 16. These are national figures but bearing in mind that about 85% of Rwanda’s population live in rural areas, it seems reasonable to assume that national changes in inequality and poverty are reflected in rural areas. See Ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?”; and IFAD, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project.

33. Vinck, Rwanda Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis.

34. IFAD, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 1.

35. Ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?,” 8.

36. IFAD, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 2.

37. Huggins, “Land Grabbing and Land Tenure Security.” Villagisation in these three countries involved millions of people being relocated into large grid-like villages of thousands of people, whereas imidugudu villages are smaller, less rigidly planned and more often connected to administrative and social provision.

38. Verhofstadt and Maertens, Cooperative Membership and Agricultural Performance, 8.

39. A fascinating contrasting case study of cooperative development is Ansoms et al., “The Reorganization of Rural Space in Rwanda.”

40. These joint programmes are funded by the World Bank.

41. See Ansoms, “Re-engineering Rural Society,” 305–308.

42. van Hoywegen, “The Urgency of Land and Agrarian Reform”; and de Lame, A Hill among a Thousand, 42.

43. The GoR has moved from monopolising the importation of fertiliser to a licensing of imports and a maintenance of standards in fertilisers. It is currently moving towards a regulated competitive market in fertiliser importation and retail.

44. Most importantly decentralisation of local government and the land laws issued in after the cadastral survey and registration of land.

45. Ansoms, “Re-engineering Rural Society.”

46. Ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?,” 17; and Pritchard, “Land, Power and Peace.”

47. Hakram-Lodhi and Kay, “‘Surveying the Agrarian Question,” 179.

48. Through legislation and a comprehensive cadastral survey.

49. Ansoms et al. argue for a strategy of ‘broad-based growth founded on small-scale agricultural activity’. Ansoms et al., “The Reorganization of Rural Space in Rwanda,” 181. But it is at this point that the narrative moves away from Rwanda’s situation to outline a general set of points relating to pro-smallholder approaches.

50. Fifty per cent of rural households currently farm less than 0.5 hectares. Golooba-Mutebi, Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa, 2. ‘Mirroring the rise in population density over the last forty years from 121 to over 350 persons per square kilometre, the national average land parcel size has dropped from 2 ha in 1960 to 0.35 in 2007.’ Pritchard, “Land, Power and Peace,” 188.

51. Leegwater, “Sharing Scarcity.”

52. Huggins, “‘Control Grabbing and Small-scale Agricultural Intensification.”

53. Thompson, Whispering Truth to Power; Leegwater, “Sharing Scarcity”; and Purdekova, “Rendering Rwanda Governable.”

54. Chakravarty, “Navigating the Middle Ground.”

55. Ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?”

56. Reyntjens, Political Governance.

57. des Forges, “Land in Rwanda.”

58. Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression; and des Forges, Defeat is the only Bad News.

59. De Lame, A Hill among a Thousand, 468.

60. Verhofstadt and Maertens, Cooperative Membership, 14.

61. Huggins, “Land Grabbing and Land Tenure Security.”

62. des Forges, “Land in Rwanda.”

63. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

64. Pritchard, “Land, Power and Peace.”

65. As is implied in Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards, 124ff.