Bitter sugarification: sugar frontier and contract farming in Uganda

ABSTRACT

Contract farming schemes have recently been portrayed by global development agencies as an alternative to ‘land grabs’, promoting processes of inclusive development through the integration of smallholders within global agro-industrial production complexes. The paper takes issue with such argument, using the case-study of contract farming scheme at Kakira Sugar Works in Uganda as empirical terrain for this investigation. It argues that despite contract farming schemes at first sight appear not to generate dispossession or displacement, they lead to forms of expulsion and/or marginalization of poor smallholders from sugar agro-poles through social differentiation. It also maintains that rather than being the antithesis to land enclosures, contract farming represents one instance of global neoliberal agricultural restructuring, functional to the expansion of the sugar frontier at cheap costs. This process, which I term sugarification, involves the maximization of value extraction from farmers, its appropriation by agribusiness and finance capital, and a regime of production which devaluates labour (wage and family) and nature, while dramatically affecting existing livelihoods and landscapes.

KEYWORDS:

• Contract farming
• land enclosures
• sugarification
• sugar frontier
• dispossession from below

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The nucleus-outgrower scheme is one of the two most diffused types of contract farming. The other, independent contract farmers without nucleus estates, is predominant in Africa.

2 The company accepts sugarcane with a minimum of 5% sucrose content and makes further deductions on the price per tons according to the physical state of the cane.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuliano Martiniello

Giuliano Martiniello is Assistant Professor of Rural Community Development at the American University of Beirut. Giuliano obtained his PhD from the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds in 2011. He was a research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University (2012–2015) and post-doctoral research fellow at the School of Built Environment and Development Studies at the University of Kwazulu-Natal (2013–2014). He is broadly interested in the political economy, political sociology and political ecology of agrarian change and rural development in Africa and the Middle East. He has published articles in internationally recognized journals such as World Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Geoforum, Third World Quarterly and the Review of African Political Economy, and is co-editor of the book Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (2018, ZedBooks).