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Article Excerpt
In April 2008 the world rice price reached a record high of more than U. S. $ 1,000 per ton, more than double its January price. The price spike precipitated food riots in countries that were especially dependent on imported rice, including those in Africa south of the Sahara. Imported rice satisfies 39 percent of the region's rice consumption needs (ARC 2008, 5). Africa is home to 13 percent of the world's population, but its rice imports account for 32 percent of all world rice imports (Seck 2007= 1). High-priced rice imports particularly affected West African countries, where consumption grew 6.6 percent annually from 2001 to 2005 (ARC 2008, 10). Three of the world's top ten rice importers are Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, and Senegal (p. 22). Their dependence on imported rice leaves these countries vulnerable to disruptions in the global rice supply, such as floods in Southeast Asian production areas, and to longer-term shifts away from rice production by rural workers who migrate to cities in India and China.
West Africa's inability to buffer itself from price shocks in food staples stems from policy decisions to restructure the region's economies that favored food imports while removing subsidies to support food producers. In the 1980s the world's major lending institutions, led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), began to require structural adjustment policies that reduced state supports for agriculture as conditions for loans. These policies affected land use and commodity production in ways that increased vulnerability to rapid fluctuation in world food prices.
Paradoxically, rice growing in West Africa dates to the domestication of the indigenous rice of Africa, Oryza glaberrima Steud., possibly in the Interior Delta zone of the Niger River 3,500-5,000 years ago (Porteres 1950; Murray 2004). The origin of rice trade in the region is more difficult to date and locate. When farmers along West Africa's coast obtained Asian rice, Oryza sativa L., in the fifteenth century, they were already growing and selling rice (Carney 2001). Today rice in West Africa is a major crop. With demand greater than production, one response by international agricultural research has been to seek higher-yielding rice varieties, such as the Nericas, through the interspecific cross of O. glaberrima and O. sativa (Somado, Guei, and Keya 2008). However, narrowing the gap between production and demand has been an elusive goal. Single-policy solutions have proved inadequate, largely because the regional distribution of rice growing is uneven and depends on place-specific factors related to cultural history, political ecology, and the physical environment. Moreover, the economic reforms that began in the 1980s favored urban consumers and rice importers while neglecting domestic food producers.
In this article we investigate how rice-trade networks have operated since neoliberal reforms were implemented in Cote d'Ivoire. Our goal is to find out what impact the removal of subsidies and restrictions on rice trade had on rice producers and processors. Thus we examine how policy changes affect producers in an agricultural commodity chain and reveal the nature of their engagement in local, national, and international marketing systems (Bernstein 1996; Peet and Watts 1996; Bebbington and Batterbury 2001). As a study of local impacts of globalization, our work also contributes to the geographical study of market networks, using historical and ethnographic methods to understand market conditions, local economies, commodity chains, and resource access (Murdoch 1998; Guyer 2001; Bush 2004). Other rice commodity-chain studies in West Africa have focused on urban-rural relationships or econometric analyses and policy implications (Pearson, Stryker, and Humphreys 1981; Louis Berger International 1990; Benz 1996; Chaleard 1996; Chaleard, Moustier, and Leplaideur 2002). Our study adds a political ecology dimension and investigates the relationships between actors in rice production and those in rice processing.
With the objective of learning whether--and, if so, how--they changed their production activities during the 1990s and early 2000s, the study is based on interviews of rice farmers, processors, transporters, and traders, as well as with local extension and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers in Cote d'lvoire (Figure 1). In the first of two sets of interviews, we used a rapid-appraisal technique in February 2002 covering all of the major rice-producing departments (administrative units) to assess the status of rice farming and processing in comparison to a decade earlier (Becker and Diallo 1992,1996). From the data collected, we selected four major rice-producing and rice-processing areas for more in-depth fieldwork. There we conducted a total of 248 interviews using three different questionnaires over a six-month period.
COMMODITY CHAINS AND ACTOR NETWORKS
In this study we used the concepts of "commodity chain" and "actor network." The former is the sequential process of a commodity's transformation as it moves through various stages of production, processing, and distribution. The investigation of a commodity chain such as rice from field to market provides a framework for examining relationships among actors--for example, farmers, processors, transporters--at different steps in production (Gereffe and Korzeniewicz 1994; Bernstein 1996; Leslie and Reimer 1999). Diverse workers--or "actors"--along the rice commodity chain form spatial networks (Murdoch 1998). Fields, threshing sites, mills, and markets are geographical nodes connected through the work of growers, traders, processors, and transporters who activate various social contacts (Kinship alliances, debt obligations, valued types of rice) to gain access to resources (land, labor, fertilizer, tractors, storage sheds, sacks, buses). Together, the commodity-chain and actor--network approaches are particularly suited to understanding the spatial complexity of trade coupled with kinship and social relationships in the informal sector (Bush 2004).
Unlike much of the literature on actor network theory and commodity chains, which pertains to service and industrial economies of the global North, our study contributes to the less-studied, rural South, where informal-sector activities often prevail. In Ghana, for example, a study showed how the transformation of wild animals into urban meat benefiled Ghana's rural poor (Mendelson, Cowlishaw, and Rowcliffe 2003). Similarly for firewood in Senegal and river fish in Laos (Ribot 1998; Bush 2004), commodity-chain studies of informal-sector trade facilitated analysis of the impact of national and international policies on the large numbers of rural poor who were exploiting natural resources. In both cases the rural poor supplied burgeoning national--and international, in the case of fish in Laos--demands that raised grave concerns about environmental sustainability and ultimately took forms not prescribed by policymakers. In each of these cases, relationships among dispersed actors in the chain affected the flow of rural goods to urban areas.
PHYSICAL AND CULTURAL SETTING OF RICE IN COTE D'IVOIRE
Cote d'Ivoire's physical setting for agriculture is most influencned by a broad, gradual transition between a southern wet-dry tropical forest zone and a northern wooded savanna (Gigou 1987). Annual precipitation totals are highest in the southwest and lowest in the northeast near the Burkina Faso--Ghana border. Seasons in the northern savanna are strongly marked by a monomodal rainfall pattern caused by the annual movement of the intertropical convergence zone, with mean monthly precipitation maximums in August. An increasingly long rainy season and higher annual rainfall totals characterize the transition to the south. In the southern zone the moist period extends from February through October.
The rice-growing calendar reflects the precipitation seasons, and farmers use rice varieties that are adapted to West Africa's ecological niches. In the forest zone farmers sow upland rice as soil moisture rises in March or April. In the savanna, farmers sow upland rice in June or July. Throughout Cote d'Ivoire rice occupies small, topographically low areas that hold water. In areas that have cement water systems with irrigation canals farmers can grow two rice crops per year.
Rice is one of the most important food crops in Cote d'Ivoire, but its cultivation and consumption are not uniform (Becker and Diallo 1992, 1996). Regionally, it is most important in the west, among the southern Mande and Kru peoples, where it shares a place in the diet and crop rotations with cassava. It is also significant in the cropping systems and diets of the Malinke and Senufo peoples in the north, where it joins maize, millet, and yam as a major food crop. Generally rice has been absent or played only a minor role in the southeastern quadrant, among the Akan-speaking peoples. During the twentieth century, labor migrations of peoples from the north and neighboring Burkina Faso, Mali, and Guinea have led to a mosaic of more recently established ethnic communities interspersed with indigenous communities throughout the south. These newer communities often grow rice--and maize--thus creating a patchwork of rice growing areas in zones...
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