‘Getting to the root causes of migration’ in West Africa – whose history, framing and agency counts?

ABSTRACT

Today’s ‘irregular migration’ from Sub-Saharan Africa has its roots in decades of policies which have impoverished rural economies and dispossessed small-scale producers to make room for export-oriented monocultures. Under pressure from opportunistic xenophobic political configurations the EU is reacting by seeking to block the unwanted flow of African migrants in their home countries through measures denounced by European civil society organizations. Its long-term recipe for ‘addressing the root causes of migration’ involves using EU cooperation funds to leverage resources from private investors ‘looking for new investment opportunities in emerging markets’, thereby promoting the same model of agricultural production and global value chains that has sparked today’s migration waves. An absent voice in the debate is that of the rural organizations in the territories from which the migrants originate. This paper seeks to reframe the issues from the viewpoint of these social constituencies, to recuperate their popular history of the evolutions that have transformed a portion of rural mobility into Europe-bound irregular migration, to map relevant contemporary rural transformations and the complexities of relations they engender, and to highlight initiatives underway today to build options of dignified and remunerative rural livelihoods for young people. Setting the West Africa-Europe nexus in the context of global processes of migration governance, this paper explores the opportunities for counter-hegemonic strategizing that EU internal policy contradictions open up and suggests how convergences might be promoted among actors and spaces that are currently inadequately connected with a view to defending both the right to migrate and the right to choose to stay at home.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic migrants
• food sovereignty
• peasant movements
• policy incoherence
• global governance
• human rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A significant exception is the more broadly framed European Coordination Via Campesina working document on migration and wage-labour (2017).

2 This section draws on McKeon et al. (2004) and McKeon (2005).

3 See Dupriez (1980) for extremely interesting calculations in this regard.

4 Mamadou Dia, 1957, quoted in Lecomte (2001).

5 Burkinabé peasant quoted in Construire ensemble (1981).

6 In good part due to their acceptance of bank loans during the fluidity boom of the 70s to fund the ‘modernization’ of their economies, according to Western development dogma of the time, by investing in industrialization and mechanization initiatives that most often turned out to be ‘white elephants’.

7 Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal.

8 Bernard Lédéa Ouedraogo.

9 Famara Diedhiou.

10 Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger, Senegal and Zimbabwe.

11 90% of the EUTF funds come from ODA, in particular the European Development Fund.

12 Personal communication, 4 February 2018.

13 Africa-Caribbean-Pacific, the former colonies of EU members.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nora McKeon

Nora McKeon is an historian/political scientist by training. She worked for many years to open up the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to small-scale producers’ and civil society organizations. She now engages in research, teaching and advocacy around food systems, peoples’ movements, and governance. She closely follows evolutions in global food governance including the Committee on World Food Security. She teaches at Rome 3 University and the International University College of Turin. Publications include: Peasant Organizations in Theory and Practice (with Michael Watts and Wendy Wolford, UNRISD 2004), The United Nations and Civil Society (Zed 2009), Global Governance for World Food Security (Heinrich-Böll Foundation, 2011), The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition: a coup for corporate capital? (TNI 2014) and Food Security Governance: empowering communities, regulating corporations (Routledge 2015). She has co-edited a special issue of Globalizations on land-grabbing and global governance (Vol. 10, Issue 1, 2013) and has written numerous articles and book chapters.