Peasants, Capital and State

The aim of this paper is to shed light on an aspect of the differentiation and stratification of peasant cash crop producers in high potential areas of Kenya. Rapid expansion of cash crop production among peasants since the Swynerton Plan of 1954 had several important implications for the differentiation of peasantry. The study examines the impact of capital and/or state intervention on differentiation process. This concerns the struggle between peasants and capital/state over the conditions of production and the terms of exchange.Three areas of Murang'a, Kericho and Mumias are selected for the cases of coffee, tea and sugarcane production. The organisational bodies of peasant cash crop production varied from cooperatives for coffee, para-statal body (KTDA) for tea to private company with the Government being the majority shareholder for sugarcane. The control of production and exchange included the supply of prescribed package of inputs on credit, the supervision of cultivation and the imposition of producer prices through monopsony. In Mumias outgrower scheme, the control culminated in the vertical integration of outgrower production where the minimum decision making was left to peasant producers. The reactions of peasant farmers to the control were manifested in a number of ways: the overt political actions for resistance to planting regulations and for the realization of a new plan; evasion of control by “illegal” or “private” planting and “black market” sales of fertilizers supplied on credit.The diffusion of cash crop production under the control of capital/state and the overt and covert reaction of different strata of peasants in different ways contributed to the emergent three groups of peasant cash crop producers with different patterns of consumption and investment.A small stratum of rich peasant producers with larger landholding had considerable incomes from cash crop production. But they were less dependent on a single cash crop because they had access to other sources of income from food and livestock production and often from trade or salaried employment. While they invested their surpluses in farm improvement, they also invest in non-farm business and secondary education so as to diversify their economic activities.The middle group, within which the vast majority of peasant cash crop producers fell, received the cash crop income which was not sufficient to generate a sizeable surplus for investment. Most of their income was spent on such basic needs as food and clothes, and the rest, on school fees, consumer goods and improvement in housing. While cash crop income was the important source of cash for the middle group with food crop production for home consumption, it acted as a safeguard against their proletarianization. It allowed the peasant farmers to meet basic cash expenditure without having to dispose of the land or depending on off-farm wage labour. It is also significant that the uniform credit systems of inputs, technical assistance and marketing services enabled middle peasant to compete successfully with the upper stratum of rich peasants in cash crop production.While the rapid expansion of cash crop production in high potential areas reached the smaller land owners, they were marginal cash crop producers who were obliged to supplement their income with casual wage labour. Growing cash crop on the smallest land holdings created such a pressure on subsistence food production that the farmers had to depend on the purchase of staple food

Agricultural economics · Business · Capital (architecture) · Cash · Cash crop · Economics · Geography · Market economy · Peasant · Production (economics) · State (computer science) · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Finance

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  Henry Bernstein•The Journal of Peasant Studies•1979

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