The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Côte d'Ivoire, 1880–1995

by Thomas J. Bassett

• ISBN13: 9780521783132
• ISBN10: 0521783135
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The literature of Africa is dominated by accounts of crisis and gloom. But Thomas Bassett, a distinguished American geographer well known in the field of development, tells an unusual story of the growth of the cotton economy of West Africa. One of the few long-running success stories in African development, change was brought about by tens of thousands of small-scale peasant farmers. While the introduction of new strains of cotton in French West Africa was in part a result of agronomic research by French scientists, supported by an unusually efficient marketing structure, this is not a case of triumphant top-down 'planification'. Employing the case of Côte d'Ivoire, Professor Bassett shows agricultural intensification to result from the cumulative effect of decades of incremental changes in farming techniques and social organization. A significant contribution to the literature, the book demonstrates the need to consider the local and temporal dimensions of agricultural innovations. It brings into question many key assumptions that have influenced development policies during the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
List of tables	xii
Preface	xiii
Glossary	xviii
Introduction	1	(26)
Cotton and the discourse of development	4	(4)
Defining and explaining agricultural revolutions	8	(3)
The interplay of induced and directed innovations	11	(2)
Agricultural development and agrarian politics	13	(3)
Research site	16	(5)
Research methods	21	(2)
The general argument and organization of the book	23	(4)
The collision of empires, 1880--1911	27	(24)
European accounts of pre-colonial northern Cote d'Ivoire	27	(4)
African cotton	31	(3)
The Korhogo region on the eve of colonization	34	(10)
Redrawing the map	44	(7)
The uncaptured corvee, 1912--1946	51	(35)
The ``disguised corvee''	56	(7)
The parallel cotton market	63	(3)
The push for cotton exports	66	(14)
The decline of cotton	80	(6)
Repackaging cotton, 1947--1963	86	(21)
The discipline of the market	87	(3)
Institutional and organizational reforms	90	(4)
Migrant labor and the ``climate of freedom''	94	(9)
The CFDT system	103	(4)
Making cotton work, 1964--1984	107	(39)
The data behind the cotton revolution	114	(4)
Labor bottlenecks and agricultural change	118	(3)
Population and labor constraints	121	(3)
Labor bottleneck periods	124	(2)
Farmer adjustments to labor bottlenecks	126	(20)
``To sow or not to sow'': the extensification of cotton, gender politics, and rural mobilization, 1985--1995	146	(28)
The erosion of farmer incomes	147	(4)
The extensification of cotton	151	(3)
Contested cropping	154	(3)
Managing debt	157	(3)
The cooperative movement	160	(2)
Striking cotton markets	162	(3)
The end of modernization	165	(1)
Crop diversification	166	(2)
Cooperative turns	168	(6)
Conclusion	174	(11)
Closing the price gap: parallel markets and the origins of the CFDT system	175	(2)
Making cotton work: locally induced innovations	177	(1)
The landscape of change	178	(4)
Made of peasant cotton	182	(3)
Appendix 1: Cote d'Ivoire seed cotton production, 1912--1998	185	(3)
Notes	188	(31)
Bibliography	219