Respond to ONE of the following THREE questions in 500 words or less.

(1) How does Harrison respond to those who claim that the Rwandan government’s approach to agriculture is leading to ‘differentiation’ (i.e. some parts of the peasantry are becoming rich while others are becoming poor) and is authoritarian? Are you satisfied with Harrison’s response? 

(2) Do you think palm oil has improved the life of Indonesians? Why or why not?

(3) How do both the “industrial narrative” and the “small-scale narrative” fail to account for aquaculture in the Global South and its impact on food security? 

250-300 words

Book Reviews 393

managers, too, have cynically claimed that replacing reforesting areas and watershed forests with

rubber trees should be viewed as merely replacing one type of carbon with another. Indeed,

McElwee claims that there is “some evidence that the ontological uncertainties about what con-

stitutes a forest or a tree that have arisen in the context of discussions about REDD+ may be

contributing to forest conversion and deforestation . . .” (p. 199). The question of what counts as

a forest is one that runs throughout McElwee’s book.

McElwee asks in her Conclusion, “is environmental rule a deliberate pretext to hide social

goals under environmental practices, or is it more diffuse and less directed?” (pp. 213–214). While

she views her project as one of unmasking the real social intent behind practices aimed at protect-

ing nature, the book particularly succeeds in drawing attention to the unwanted social consequences

of such projects. It helps us to understand better the effects of environmental rule and to plan more

properly such interventions. Even though the author speculates that environmental rule is weak-

ening in Vietnam, her book demonstrates that almost any human intervention into non-human

nature will create winners and losers in society.

Given McElwee’s experience advising on forest policy, she could have done more to sketch

out what successful interventions might look like. She could have also written more about the

agency of actual trees as, surprisingly, readers are mostly shown only the forests and not indi-

vidual species. But now I am asking for an act of alchemy—the gold that McElwee provides is

more than enough.

Michitake Aso 麻生道武
University at Albany, State University of New York

The Oil Palm Complex: Smallholders, Agribusiness and the State
in Indonesia and Malaysia
Rob Cramb and John F. McCarthy, eds.
Singapore: NUS Press, 2016, xvi+470pp.

The Oil Palm Complex: Smallholders, Agribusiness and the State in Indonesia and Malaysia consists

of 14 chapters written by 16 contributors. Each chapter has its own topic and independent conclu-

sion, especially Chapters 3 to 13. And the final chapter (Chapter 14) provides a conclusion based

on the key findings of each chapter. Therefore, I will summarize each chapter and then discuss

Chapter 14.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide a framework for the following chapters, including a systematic

overview of the ways in which land, labor, and capital have been mobilized and combined in differ-

ent modes of production. In Chapter 1 Rob Cramb and John F. McCarthy explain the aim of the

Book Reviews394

book: understanding the oil palm industry in Indonesia and Malaysia as a complex whole from the

perspective of political economy. To provide the context for the following chapters, the authors

clarify the economic differences between Indonesia and Malaysia; the different political back-

grounds and characteristics of Indonesia, Peninsular Malaysia, and Malaysia’s Borneo states (Sabah

and Sarawak); and the regionalization that means a fusion of the Indonesian and Malaysian oil palm

industries and formation of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) on a global scale. In

Chapter 2 Cramb and McCarthy explain the agro-economic features of oil palm production. They

examine the mobilization of land, labor, and capital within and across the oil palm industries in

Indonesia and Malaysia, and their incorporation in different modes of production; as well as estates,

managed smallholder schemes, nucleus estate and smallholder (NES) schemes, joint venture

schemes, assisted smallholders, and independent smallholders. The authors clarify two contradic-

tory trajectories in production modes. On the one hand is “capitalist convergence,” which means

the expansion of the estate mode and pursuit of the joint venture scheme; on the other hand is the

surge of independent smallholders.

Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 explore the different modes of oil palm production in practice and

the circumstances that give rise to different livelihood outcomes, both within and between given

modes. In Chapter 3 Zahari Zen, Colin Barlow, Ria Gondowarsito, and John F. McCarthy reveal

the NES schemes that were implemented mainly during the Suharto period and contribute mod-

erately to rural socioeconomic improvement. In addition, the authors explain new phenomena from

the post-Suharto period, namely, increasing individual smallholders, new private companies’ initia-

tives for local contributions such as a community oil palm area, and the partnership model (joint

venture scheme in Chapter 2). The authors maintain that the role of the state remains critical in

socioeconomic improvement. The challenge remains making initiatives even more effective. In

Chapter 4 John F. McCarthy and Zahari Zen analyze the processes of inclusion/exclusion or adverse

incorporation regarding the oil palm boom in Jambi, Sumatra. NES scheme projects help to create

agrarian differentiation in which rural elites and entrepreneurs accumulate economic and social

power (inclusion process). Successful transmigrants, in-migrants, and village and district elites

bought local private/common lands. Some local farmers who lost their lands/livelihoods became

wage laborers (exclusion process); others who established oil palm fields by themselves were

suffering from low productivity because they did not have the techniques and capital for buying

high-yielding seedlings and agrochemical inputs (adverse incorporation). In Chapter 5 Lesley M.

Potter searches for alternative smallholder pathways in Indonesian oil palm production and for

methods and techniques that are “smallholder-friendly.” Based on case studies in Costa Rica,

Cameroon, and Ecuador, the author considers three alternative pathways: (1) mixed cultivation of

oil palm and other crops, (2) increased numbers of small competing mills that would supply inputs

and extension services or be specifically designed to serve local markets, and (3) a widening of the

roles of Indonesian cooperatives to engage in alternative economic activities. In Chapter 6 Rob

Book Reviews 395

Cramb argues that the dominant mode of oil palm expansion in Sarawak has been driven not pri-

marily by technical or market imperatives but by the exercise of state power to maximize oppor-

tunities for surplus extraction and political patronage. Sarawak state promoted the joint venture

scheme to deliver extensive state and customary land to private estates and to import low-wage

Indonesian labor by using the policy narrative, bringing the “native” into the modern sector or

mainstream of development. In Chapter 7 Rob Cramb and Patrick S. Sujang focus on the recent

emergence of oil palm smallholders in northern Sarawak. The authors find that smallholders

achieve good returns with their limited resources of labor and capital while maintaining a degree

of livelihood diversity. Different from the findings of Chapter 4 in the case of Jambi, Indonesia, the

rapid growth of oil palm smallholders has not been associated with marked differentiation between

rural households in northern Sarawak.

Chapters 8, 9, and 10 explore the nature of the conflicts arising from contested approaches to

oil palm development. In Chapter 8 the authors mention that NGO advocacy often results in

unintended consequences, including intensified conflicts among oil palm stakeholders. Contrary

to what is widely assumed, the environmental impact is rather a less common issue in such dis-

putes. As oil palm is more profitable for local smallholders, the main causes of conflict are merely

economic ones, namely, unwanted land conversion in West Kalimantan. Also, the authors refute

the traditional view that companies are the only ones to blame for exploiting other stakeholders.

As such, the authors state that the contemporary NGO mission is not to advocate against the crop

itself but to ensure the fair distribution of wealth in the production chain of oil palms. In Chapter

9 the author focuses on four key local stakeholders in an Indonesian oil palm plantation: the com-

pany, government, cooperative, and community. Through a stakeholder map analysis and a discus-

sion of their diverse quotes, the author reveals the diversity, complexity, and power imbalances

within a plantation. The prevailing participatory process used by the companies reinforces the

existing power imbalance because it fails to take into account the implicit power relations. Par-

ticipation per se is no longer a panacea. Because power relations are intimately connected to how

stakeholders communicate, participation must encompass an awareness of the power relations and

of smallholder agency. Chapter 10 studies the ways in which resistance against oil palm plantations

has varied, using two case studies in Landak District (PIR-Bun V Ngabang) and Seruyan District

(the Lake Sembuluh Subdistrict). Comparing the covert and individual actions in Ngabang with

the overt and organized ones in Sembuluh, it not only demonstrates their variations in contexts

and strategies but also reveals that both have the common intention to gain greater access to the

benefits that the paradigm of a large-scale capitalist enterprise system can offer.

Chapters 11 and 12 focus on plantation labor. Chapter 11 studies the impact of oil palm plan-

tations on the labor regime in Indonesia. Although some legitimate the allocation of large parts of

land to oil palm plantations due to its effect of creating employment and reducing poverty, the

author demonstrates that this argument does not consider “Indonesia’s oil palm labor regime”

Book Reviews396

through the dual strategy of enclosing land to dispossess local people and importing labor from

other regions by the transmigration system. Chapter 12 focuses on the situation of Indonesian

migrant workers on oil palm plantations in Malaysia. Due to the economic gap between Malaysia

and Indonesia, Malaysian oil palm plantations invite migrant workers from Indonesia to undertake

work that locals are not willing to do, the so-called 3D: dirty, dangerous, and demeaning. Based

on interviews with workers in Sarawak, this chapter depicts the factors that drove them to migra-

tion, how they are experiencing it, and what sort of household livelihood strategies they are

constructing.

In Chapter 13 Oliver Pye examines the oil palm complex at the transnational level by focusing

on the RSPO, a global multi-stakeholder organization made up of oil palm growers, NGOs, manu-

facturing and retail companies, and so on that develops a certification system to realize sustainable

palm oil production. However, the author shows that even certified oil palm companies can be

engaged in environmentally and socially unsustainable production methods. The author explains

that this contradiction is caused by the voluntary system of RSPO and collaboration between

Malaysian political bodies and leading oil palm companies to prioritize economic profits in RSPO.

In Chapter 14 McCarthy and Cramb explain the way of understanding the oil palm industry in

Indonesia and Malaysia as a complex whole (Indonesia-Malaysia oil palm complex) based on the

key findings of each chapter. First, the authors recognize the oil palm complex as being constituted

of interrelationships among agribusiness firms and agents, national and local governments, rural

households and communities, and local and transnational civil society actors. Then, the oil palm

complex is formed and reformed based on shifts of interests and capabilities on the part of con-

stituent actors, being influenced by both internal and external changes (e.g., the shift to market-led

forms of development and the 1998 financial crisis). Various oil palm plantation development

schemes in Indonesia and Malaysia have been formed and changed in this process. This formation

or reformation of the oil palm complex is determined by political settlements emerging from com-

promises between powerful groups, mainly companies and governments, that set the context for

institutional and other policies. Subsequently, development schemes formalized by political settle-

ments are implemented at the local level. The working of social relations within a scheme, village,

or plantation context—such as negotiations between plantation representatives, village leaders,

and farmers over land allocation (amount of land taken over by a company, returned to farmers as

productive oil palm, and left available for food crops) and availability and conditions of employment

on the plantation—shapes the degree to which farmers and plantation workers access the stream

of benefits derived from oil palm production. Based on this way of understanding, the authors

discuss three recent trajectories of the oil palm complex: (1) convergence on the plantation mode,

(2) smallholder resurgence, and (3) a trend toward private regulation, such as the RSPO.

Here I would like to discuss the achievements of this book and the next issues to be dealt

with. The book provides a way of understanding the oil palm industry in Indonesia and Malaysia

Book Reviews 397

as a complex whole. This way of understanding can answer the following long-debated questions:

Why are companies’ oil palm plantations still expanding in forested areas? Why are there still land

conflicts between local people and companies? Why are plantation workers still working under

poor conditions? This book provides a new answer, namely, structural, political, and economic

co-dependencies and mutualities of companies and governments between Indonesia and Malaysia.

Malaysian companies provide financial capital and technology through joint ventures with Indone-

sian companies, while those Malaysian companies can get access to land and labor at a low cost

with lax regulation, with help from Indonesian politicians and officials. In addition, although previ-

ous research has focused on the social-economic impacts of oil palm development for smallholders,

this book discusses and provides a way of understanding why social-economic impacts for small-

holders and smallholders’ reactions to the oil palm boom are so different within and between

communities. This book emphasizes that the success of smallholders depends on (1) the way in

which local contextual factors, scheme designs (e.g., NES and joint-venture schemes), and struc-

tural factors intersect; (2) the interests, agency, and resistance of smallholders and local communi-

ties; and (3) mediating institutional processes that can influence smallholders’ access to resources

(e.g., technology, inputs, finance, market, land, and benefits). In addition, this book explains the

issues with the RSPO’s approach from the viewpoint of the Indonesia-Malaysia oil palm complex.

Although the idea of an Indonesia-Malaysia oil palm complex is based on the key findings of

each chapter, including case studies at specific locales, it seems that the case studies are still

limited, particularly in the provinces of Jambi and West Kalimantan in Indonesia and the state of

Sarawak in Malaysia. Considering that there are diverse political, economic/industrial, social, and

cultural situations in Indonesia and Malaysia, it is necessary to accumulate case studies to find

diverse patterns of oil palm complex at the local level and elaborate the understanding of the oil

palm complex. In addition, although this book provides original insights into oil palm issues, it

unfortunately does not make any original policy recommendation based on its understanding of the

Indonesia-Malaysia oil palm complex. It is also a shame that some of the literature cited in several

chapters is not in the respective reference lists.

Terauchi Daisuke 寺内大左
Faculty of Sociology, Toyo University

From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool through Malay Lives
Tim Bunnell
Chichester and Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2016, xvii+284pp.

One day in September 2005, this reviewer was enjoying “authentic Malaysian cuisine that is 100%

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Rwanda: an agrarian developmental state?

Graham Harrison

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Rwanda: an agrarian developmental state?
Graham Harrison

Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK

Introduction

This article explores Rwanda’s agricultural policy within the context of the agrarian question.
That is, it looks at Rwanda’s specific situation and the contours of its agricultural change
and policy initiatives as a way to analyse how the Government of Rwanda (GoR) and other
aligned agencies are responding to an ‘insistent’ question in countries with large agricultural
sectors: how to manage the multiple forces that expand and deepen capitalist social relations
in agriculture so that social change is tolerably stable and maximally socially beneficial?
This particular framing to analyse Rwanda’s agricultural dynamics has the merit of moving
away from commonly one-sided and sometimes polemic analyses of Rwanda’s development,
because it situates policy, intervention and peasant agency within a political economy beset
by political difficulties and material hardships of a high order. Without this context – and a
historically informed evaluation of policy reactions to it – one is likely to miss the distinctive
aspects of Rwanda’s agricultural transition, downplay the straitened room for manoeuvre
for any Rwandan government, and to move rather too quickly over the substantial achieve-
ments of the government to date. None of this, however, is to make a totalising celebration
of Rwanda’s agricultural strategy, and far less to make claims of an inexorable forward march
towards prosperity in the countryside.

ABSTRACT
This article investigates Rwanda’s agricultural policies and institutions
as a historically contextualised response to exceptionally adverse
developmental circumstances. Using the agrarian question as an
analytical point of reference, the article argues that it is extremely
difficult to identify how increases in productivity and income in
smallholder agriculture can be achieved without forceful state action
and a sustained injection of resources. In light of this, entirely right-
congruent governance is caught in a dilemma about the extent to
which the government overrides peasants’ own agency and the
extent to which the agrarian strategy produces a sustained and
stable transformation in agriculture. Rather than making a defence
or condemnation of the government’s strategy, the article argues
against pre-emptive judgements of an agrarian strategy that can only
discernibly attain success over a long period. What the article does do
is insist that there is development potential in the current strategy,
not simply a disaster in the making.

© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com

KEYWORDS
Rwanda
agrarian question
developmental state
governance

ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 13 February 2015
Accepted 1 June 2015

CONTACT Graham Harrison g.harrison@sheffield.ac.uk

THiRD WoRlD QUARTeRly, 2016
Vol. 37, No. 02, 354–370
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058147

mailto:g.harrison@sheffield.ac.uk

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THIRd WoRld QUaRTeRly 355

The article introduces the agrarian question as a conceptual framework before situating
the framework in a Rwandan context. It then maps out Rwanda’s agricultural strategy not
only as a set of policies and objectives but also (in keeping with the focus offered through
the agrarian question) as a state-based development project. Through a detailing of agrarian
strategy within an agrarian-question frame of reference, we argue that Rwanda is in a situ-
ation in which imperfect progress has been achieved. The article concludes by considering
what this means for ongoing assessments of Rwanda’s agricultural development, which is,
of course, in its early stages.

The agrarian question: the political economy of constraint

In its broadest formulation the agrarian question is: how to manage capitalist transition in
agriculture? deriving from a Marxist theoretical background, the agrarian question is about
the political economy of capitalist social relations in peasant societies. The agrarian question
offers a ‘rigorous but flexible analytical framework to explore the processes that contribute
to or constrain the emergence of agrarian capital and rural capitalism’.1 empirically and the-
oretically the ‘question’ (rarely asked as single simple question but more as a thematic2) has
concerned itself with the dynamic persistence of peasant livelihoods as countries undergo
capitalist development. In concrete instances many social processes are involved: the rise of
commercial farming, the concentration of land, the imposition of privatised land tenure sys-
tems, dispossession of peasants, the expansion of state regulation of peasant production and
exchange, processes of social differentiation within peasant societies, the intensification of
commoditisation within peasant households as people produce increasing amounts for mar-
ket exchange, the growth of wage labour as part of the peasant household’s reproduction,
the introduction of contract farming, and the expansion of capital into agricultural ‘chains’
supplying credit and technologies. In empirical instances these process might combine and
may or may not involve actual dispossession of land. I may well have missed something
out, but the point is illustrative: that agricultural societies are not historic residuals in the
onward march of urban-industrial capitalism but are at the heart of capitalist development,
manifesting a diverse set of historical processes that are not well summarised as ‘the death
of the peasantry’. at the heart of this diversity is a core driver: the combined and uneven
development of capitalist social relations.

The agrarian question offers a uniquely insightful way to analyse actions of states and
other agencies in their attempts to transform agriculture. analytically we are drawn towards
political economy: the distribution and contestation of authority over resources, labour and
market power. epistemologically not only do we assume that agriculture can be as ‘mod-
ern’ and dynamic as any other economic sector, we also recognise that agrarian transitions
are determinedly troublesome transitions. Intensifying work, the appropriation of property
and surplus, the establishing of new forms (and norms) of accumulation, the expansion of
state power and so on do not generate the kind of freedom-enhancing positive-sum and
incentive-rich social changes that liberal and ‘grassroots’ theories of development might
suggest. Nor do they allow policy makers, consultants and donors to recommend policies and
programmes ex cathedra as if the minds of experts can create linear, perfected and ordered
agricultural development on the ground. In a phrase: the agrarian question is a troubled one,
issuing in a politics of constraint, contingency and always (much to the chagrin of liberals)
the politically devised allocation of hardship.

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356 G. HaRRISoN

It makes a considerable difference to talk of capitalist development rather than simply
development. ‘development’ is used in a phenomenal way – to discuss objectives and meas-
ure outcomes – and it is often based in some notion of an ordered, inclusive and socially
beneficial process. This is normatively attractive and it enables a great raft of global initiatives,
donor programmes, consultancies and government ‘visions’ of one kind or another. ‘Capitalist
development’ is a conceptualisation that is not irretrievably dour, but it does recognise that
agrarian change tends towards instability, involves social hardship for some and perhaps
many, and is not easily controlled by the state or any other single agency.

Closely related to this ‘capitalist’ sensibility is the ‘melancholic’ or ‘tragic’ approach to
development and conflict.3 ‘Tragic’ here is a stylisation of a historical methodology in which
progress is an outcome of both processes of growth, increased productivity and some gen-
eralised improvement in social well-being, and dispossession and exploitation. This ‘double
helix’ of economic progress and social hardship (to adapt from an important and related
argument4) unfolds in myriad and multi-scalar ways within historically realised processes
of capitalist accumulation. To exclude this constitutive facet of capitalism is to miss almost
everything that is important: the dynamism, flexibility and exploitative nature of actually
existing development.

a cursory review of discussions about the agrarian question readily reveals analogous
sensibilities to the melancholic nature of agrarian change.5 But, it should be emphasised as
a final point, none of this is to assert a necessitarian historical method in which nasty things
‘have to happen’ in order to produce development outcomes. This kind of consequentialism
is normatively troubling. In fact, the agrarian question as sketched here both understands
‘pain and progress’ as intertwined and interactive (hence the dNa figurative) and it is a ques-
tion not an answer. It is a way to frame realistic assessments of policy, state action, struggle,
resistance and the contestation of ideas. The agrarian question is a political question set in
a robust political economy.

The agrarian question in Rwanda

Historical context

Rwanda’s agrarian question can reasonably be characterised as an exceptionally difficult one.
This section sketches Rwanda’s agrarian history to illustrate the specific historical legacies
and constraints that shape the present day.

The beginnings of the modern state of Rwanda in the late 19th century derived from
the expansion of the Rwandan monarchy, the consolidation of a system of rural authority
over land and labour, and a class system based in ownership of cattle, claims on labour and
clientship.6 These processes were characterised by resistance, political manoeuvre, migra-
tions and conflict within a social landscape that was not primordially homogenous or inte-
grated into the Rwandan state.7 The Belgian colonial state introduced ‘ossified’ and tribalised
versions of rural authority through chieftaincy that was increasingly associated with Tutsi
social identity.8 This colonial–monarchical system imposed regimes of unpaid work and taxes
throughout Rwanda’s countryside. In rural areas and in manifold ways peasants experienced
colonialism as the loss of flexibility and accountability in the decentralised clientage that
had previously defined land and livestock, and was a more concerted conquest of the state
in what previously was a rather variegated set of alliances with the King. Throughout this

THIRd WoRld QUaRTeRly 357

period there were constant migrations in order to escape monarchical power and colonial
state exactions, or to modify political allegiances.9

on the eve of independence (1959–64), Rwanda’s political parties and related organisa-
tions struggled for access to state power, exacerbated by the manoeuvrings of the Belgian
colonial administrators and leading to violence and a migration of thousands from the
countryside mainly into what is now called the democratic Republic of Congo (dRC).10
other out-migrations followed after independence in 1962, largely of Tutsi as a result of
sporadic violence connected to President Gregoire Kayibanda’s ideology, which conflated
social democracy with Hutu empowerment.11 There followed a period of relative calm and
some stability from 1973, when Juvenal Habyarimana took power through a military coup,
implementing an authoritarian and populist programme based in an ideology that affirmed
an image of Hutu ‘peasantness’.

From the late 1970s to the late 1980s the Habyarimana regime set out a programme of
agricultural change based on four components: a conflation (more or less explicit) of the
Rwandan peasantry with the virtuous Hutu (akin to the english romantic trope of a yeoman
farmer),12 the working up of good relations with donors and the profusion of projects,13 an
emphasis on the intensification of rural labour combined with an extension of land under
cropping,14 and a prioritisation of food security based on sustained increases in food crop
production.

at the heart of this ethnic agrarian populism was ‘the project’: state-aligned and often
donor-funded attempts to reorganise peasants’ livelihoods.15 This was also the period within
which both government and donors became seized of the developmental issues posed by
high population densities on the land and a high rate of population growth, both of which
were concerns effectively associated with agriculture and the Malthusian concepts of car-
rying capacity, population pressure and famine.

during the late 1980s economic slowdown and a damaging structural adjustment pro-
gramme were accompanied by Habyarimana’s refusal to address the question of return for
over a hundred thousand Rwandan diaspora in neighbouring countries.16 Between 1985 and
1992 the international price of the two major peasant cash crops – coffee and tea – fell by
75% and 66%, respectively.17 The Habyarimana government became increasingly authori-
tarian and explicit in deploying a discourse of ethnicity akin to what lonsdale calls ‘political
tribalism’.18 during this period attacks on Tutsi (re)commenced. In 1990 the Rwanda Patriotic
Front entered Rwanda over the Ugandan border, commencing a civil war that led to more
mass migrations and livelihood disruption.

In 1994, over a period of 100 days, the remnants of the incumbent government and
the militias that it had been training for two years rolled out a genocide against the Tutsi
population after Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. during the genocide and civil war,
tens of thousands of Hutus were also killed and perhaps as many as a million people fled
the country. There were also large movements of people – over one million – within the
country, leaving a profoundly uprooted and traumatised rural society by the time the RPF
had established full control.

during the genocide militias also redistributed assets within agrarian society, justify-
ing the killing of Tutsi in terms of their (supposed) material wealth and their (supposed)
non-indigeneity.19 There was also destruction of rural property and infrastructure, and what
agribusiness remained and survived stopped production and became decrepit. The constant
labour needed to maintain waterways and terraces on the hills also ceased. detailed research

358 G. HaRRISoN

on the genocide’s spread throughout Rwanda’s rural areas reveals complex socio-political
dynamics that are not easily rendered into a mono-causal or simple explanation.20 But there
is a facet of the genocide which combined a darkly ironic repetition of the constant entreaty
to ‘work’ (now referring to killing Tutsi people in the villages, fields and marshes) and a sense
of nihilism in which one had to obey the instructions to kill relentlessly or face death at the
hands of the Interahamwe or (supposedly) the advancing RPF.21 Perhaps the most striking
example of this agrarian destructivism was the mass import of machetes as weapons rather
than tools.22 The dynamics of the genocide also interacted with struggles over land and the
emergence of large landowners in the context of increasing land scarcity.23

This brief historical sketch illustrates the key features of Rwanda’s agrarian question up
to 1994. In the first place, extreme flux and instability, manifested particularly in a series
of large-scale coerced migrations. In the second place, the underlying issue of increasing
pressure on the land. In the third place a series of (donor-funded) state projects to expand
control over peasant societies and to intervene in the livelihoods of peasants in more intru-
sive and detailed fashion. and, in the fourth place, the genocide, which has left a political but
often covert legacy of anxiety about agrarian change and the possibilities of mass violence
in the future. If the context for most african states when facing the strategic and political
issues concerning how to manage agrarian transitions is challenging, it seems fair to say that
Rwanda’s particular situation in 1994 was the envy of no-one. How did the RPF-dominated
government respond in this especially austere context?

Rwanda’s agrarian strategy

It is commonplace to divide Rwanda’s post-genocide history into phases. Having acknowl-
edged the caveat that these phases are useful interpretively but of course blend and overlap
when looking at detailed realities, we will follow them here. The period from 1994 to 1999 is
seen as one in which high-order issues of political order and sovereignty were paramount;
the second period (2000–06/7) is seen as one of establishing the conditions for economic
growth that involved increasing levels of donor development support and a conformity to
donor orthodoxy; the third period commenced in 2007/8 and has been characterised as
issuing in a ‘development vision’ coded into the meta-programme of Vision 2020 and the
second economic development and Poverty Reduction Strategy.24

The first phase was characterised by two major and closely interrelated endeavours:
ensuring order during resettlement and consolidating state authority throughout Rwanda’s
territory. Between 800,000 and one million refugees from pre-1990s out-migrations aimed
to return after the RPF came to power. additionally, 1.3–2 million refugees and internally
displaced people from the civil war and genocide were moving back to their lands and
residences;25 in all two-thirds of Rwanda’s people were dislocated.26 This was done through
the creation of villages and a novel ‘land sharing’ arrangement that – although by no means
perfect – was an effective means of dealing with a period of considerable flux in rural areas.
The major emphasis during this period was the basic assurance of nutrition for a popula-
tion traumatised and uprooted. This involved heavy donor funding and little in the way of
strategic development thinking. The measure of considerable success during this period
was the avoidance of famine.

The second phase was characterised by the consolidation of a development strategy that
in many ways reflected the contours of development politics in many other african countries.

THIRd WoRld QUaRTeRly 359

In 2000 the war and counterinsurgency in the northwest formally ended, a Poverty Reduction
Strategy Paper (PRSP) process commenced (leading to a PRSP in 2004), and the government’s
Vision 2020 was launched. Rwanda appeared to have recovered from the impact of the
genocide and to have ‘normalised’ into a broadly PRSP framework. Supporting this, donors
increased their lending and involvement in policy making.27 all of this was underpinned
by a ‘renaissance’ and growth narrative in which international donors and politicians were
highly impressed with Rwanda’s recovery and growth.28

a donor-supported decentralisation was introduced in 2001 that consolidated state power
in the districts and a highly consultative land reform deliberation was started. By 2004/5 the
national implementation of Gacaca reconciliation courts and further decentralisation created
a situation in which the government ‘presence’ in agrarian societies became authoritative and
pervasive.29 at this juncture the government rolled out its first comprehensive national agri-
cultural strategy, the Programme for the Strategic Transformation of agriculture 1 (PSTa1).

donor agricultural projects and the PSTa1 both aimed to support the poorest groups in
rural areas and to promote increased production. The general prioritisation of government
was not strongly focused on agriculture at this time: there was more of an emphasis on urban
regeneration, information technology and the service industry.30 There was no agricultural
sector-wide group to integrate donors into a single strategic plan. as a policy text PSTa1
focused on support for the intensified integration of smallholder agriculture into broader
market relations but there was little sense of agricultural development as a transformative
strategy. PSTa1 issued in only the beginnings of a comprehensive and integrated strategy. Its
first phase was dedicated to constructing the institutions for a sector-wide approach. Most
implementation matters were not centrally addressed. Indeed, as the PSTa1 progressed,
many donors considered the programme to have been a failure and some had considered
withdrawing support (author’s interviews with donors).

The third phase started in 2007, a period distinguished by a considerable ratcheting
up of institutional and political impetus behind a national agrarian strategy, based in a
more focused strategic objective of chain integration and ‘upgrading’. The reference to chain
upgrading has become mainstreamed within Rwanda’s agricultural policy-making circles.
It refers to two processes that are seen as interrelated: first, the increasing connection of
smallholder farming with upstream and downstream activities such as seed and fertiliser
supply and the selling of crops to processors and traders; second, efforts to improve the
quantity and quality of agricultural production (the latter not having featured in PSTa1).

This was first embodied in the Crop Intensification Programme (CIP 2007). CIP introduced
the major strategic decision to create macro-zones for cropping in an attempt to generate
regional crop specialisms and to promote a scaling-up in agriculture. The CIP’s core objec-
tive is to promote increased agricultural productivity through the application of chemical
fertilisers, the use of improved seeds and the provision of extension services. CIP has been
operationalised through the creation of government agencies: the Rwanda Cooperative
agency (RCa, 2008), Rwanda agricultural Board (RaB, 2010) and the National agricultural
export Board (NaeB, 2011). The RCa, NaeB, and RaB all supply subsidised or free inputs:
fertilisers, seeds and seedlings for example. and CIP was integrated into the broader strategy
of the PSTa2 in 2009, a programme that attained renewed donor support (partly on the back
of changed leadership within the Ministry of agriculture), met its declared targets early and
led to a PSTa3 in 2012. This triggered increased commitments from some donors (particularly
the World Bank, dFId, the eU, the Belgian BTC and the dutch) and a broader governmental

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360 G. HaRRISoN

refocusing on agriculture as the source of growth and development, articulated in the second
economic development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (2013). We shall say more about
the specifics of this phase in the next section.

Assessing Rwanda’s agricultural strategy

The prioritisation of agriculture

We have identified a ‘Rwandan agrarian question’ in four themes: high population density on
the land; high levels of migration within and out of the country; high levels of state presence
in peasant societies; and the extreme and exceptional impact of the genocide. We have also
sketched a post-genocide agricultural strategy that has moved through three phases to
bring Rwanda into a situation in which basic concerns with order and authority have been
addressed, some conformity with global agendas of development and agrarian change have
been affirmed, and the beginnings of an ambitious, holistic and more ‘Rwandan’ programme
have been introduced. This section will explore the nature of the third phase in more detail.

We should start by recognising the remarkable success Rwanda has achieved in terms
of increased output. ‘The total production of maize, wheat and cassava tripled from 2007
to 2011, the production of beans doubled, and that of rice and Irish potato increased by
30 per cent’.31 There has also been a fall in the prevalence of poverty in rural areas and in
malnutrition,32 although it is fair to say that these falls look moderate in comparison with
the increase in outputs.33 and inequality remains a major problem: the Gini coefficient has
improved but not at a rate that reflects the high levels of economic growth.34 There are,
of course, important arguments about the political dynamics that underlie these positive
figures; all sorts of hardship and poverty remain, and there is no easy to clear prognosis that
Rwanda’s agrarian society will continue to develop. These kinds of issue will be dealt with
in the next section. In this section it is worth noting what appear to be distinctive features
in Rwanda’s agrarian strategy.

The concerted focus on agriculture from about 2007 is not insignificant. It has been under-
pinned by a steady increase in the proportion of the government’s budget dedicated to agri-
culture,35 rising by roughly 10% per year.36 It has been realised through considerable resource
input and institutional innovation. It has also involved a substantial reorganisation of rural
settlement and agricultural production. There has been a push to gather smallholders into
aggregated settlements – imidugudu – although this is not a programme of villagisation in
a way that one would recognise from that which took place in 1970s Mozambique, Tanzania
or ethiopia.37 Production has been synchronised rather than collectivised and there has not
been a large-scale movement of people into communal villages.

The RCa has registered nearly 5000 cooperatives,38 each of which has a ‘business plan’ to
increase productivity, value added and integrated agricultural activities. Indeed, the coop-
erative has been the basic unit for the bulk of agricultural strategic planning. The form of
cooperative can vary from 20 or 30 households to thousands, and it may involve smallholders
simply selling collectively, the creation of blocs of individual farming units that coordinate
production, the creation of small agricultural enterprises (for example a coffee washing
station or a mill), or the creation of cooperatives for workers on agricultural plantations.39
Cooperatives are created by local initiative or through government fiat. each of these kinds
of cooperative receives support from the GoR.

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The GoR has developed a set of interconnected agencies that promote aspects of the
PSTa3. NaeB promotes the development of higher-grade exports. This involves the provi-
sion of subsidised inputs, creating branding and quality assurance, and investing in larger
and higher-specification crop processing. The RaB intervenes in similar ways for a broader
range of crops which are produced for food and domestic sale. The Ministry of agriculture
works with these agencies and more intensively with the agricultural donor group, which
funds aspects of the PSTa3 as well as national programmes such as the Rural Sector Support
Programme and the land Husbandry, Water Harvesting and Hillside Irrigation Project (RSSP/
lWH).40 The Ministry of agriculture also has various specific projects funded by donors in
fertiliser provision, land management and irrigation.

In addition, the Ministry of agriculture has also provided resources to support the intro-
duction of new crops, irrigation techniques, terracing and chemical fertiliser. Paralleling the
‘core’ agricultural support strategy, the GoR has supported the development of Savings and
Credit Cooperatives (SaCCos) and other small-scale credit facilities, as well as Girinka (again
with strong donor support), a programme which provides free livestock for the poorest
households as a form of basic economic security. all these initiatives are, characteristically for
Rwandan governance generally, articulated within specific targets and auditing procedures
under the neo-traditional rubric of imihigo.41

From growth to transformation: agricultural chains

The point here is that agricultural development is underpinned by a substantial state effort
to promote increased productivity within agriculture, largely through the agency of the
agricultural cooperative. This support is, furthermore, oriented towards an ambitious trans-
formation within Rwanda’s agricultural areas. The transformation can be characterised as one
in which peasant farmers move away from the diverse patterns of production and market
integration based on the dispersed and small plots of land that pervade Rwanda’s rural
spaces towards an aggregated and more specific mode of articulation, which brings us back
to the ‘chain’ metaphor again.

The GoR has established a coherent and integrated strategy of chain integration and
upgrading that one can identify in most policy documents, associated donor funding doc-
uments, public statements, and also within interviews. The premise is that Rwanda’s agri-
cultural sector is limited by severe land constraints and that therefore extensive forms of
agricultural development are impossible. There are forests in the north and east but these
are largely subjected to restrictions as a result of tourism and conservation. Studies also
suggest that these lands would not be good for agriculture in any case. There are some drier
areas in the south which are not intensively used. But, beyond these, Rwanda has reached
its ‘land frontier’.42 as a result, promoting increased incomes and the value of production
within agriculture can only take place through improvements in value added. The immediate
way to achieve this is through the production of either higher quality, more standardised
or more highly branded crops.

The GoR has made considerable efforts to promote this kind of integration and upgrading.
NaeB has introduced standard setting, the promotion of certification and some branding for
original-source tea and coffee. The RCa has provided support to cooperatives to establish
supply contracts with ‘downstream’ agencies. The NaeB and RCa oversee contract making
between cooperatives and agricultural processors and retailers, pushing for businesses to

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362 G. HaRRISoN

provide support to farmers in attaining the requisite levels of quality and quantity. The seed
and fertiliser programmes have been implemented through a strong extension project in
which extension officers (agronomes) work in villages, cooperatives are supported in cre-
ating demonstration fields and ‘farmer fields’ (which attempt to roll out changes in crop
practices), and district government – through various devices such as imihigo performance
contracts and the management of centrally disbursed resources – promotes investment and
innovations within cooperatives.

The Government also exercises political influence on processors and purchasers to pro-
vide cheap credit, seeds and other forms of support to the farmers it contracts to buy from.
Interviews with private sector organisations engaged in contracting with cooperatives por-
trayed the government’s political stance as primarily motivated to increase the incidence of
contract farming but also supportive of the cooperatives within this context. Interviewees in
all the major government agencies involved in agriculture mentioned unsolicited an aware-
ness that contracting and upgrading represented real risks for farmers and that it was the
government’s role to minimise these. The underlying rationale behind the various forms
of support in regard to fertiliser provision is derived from a concern that fertilisers remain
predictably affordable for cooperatives.43 The RCa also stipulates that cooperatives receive
a share of the capital of processing facilities that the government has been involved in
either through rehabilitation or privatisation. Government agencies (the RCa or the Rwanda
development Board) ‘witness’ and advise on contract-making between cooperatives and
private businesses with a remit to ensure that the contracts are reasonable in terms of expec-
tations from cooperatives. In interviews agricultural officials spoke about failed contracts (as
a result of insufficient quantities supplied or quality/standardisation shortfalls) as a concern
for processors and government in improving cooperative performance, not simply as an
agricultural supply failure.

Chain integration and upgrading are operationalised through cooperatives with the
explicit aims of both increasing the entrepreneurial identities of peasants and improving
their material well-being. The Rwandan government’s response to its agrarian question is
a muscular and ambitious transformation of agrarian society into a diversity of production
units formally named as cooperatives and integrated through contracts with businesses
upstream and downstream of the farm.

It is important to note at this point the high levels of state presence in this transformational
project. The Rwandan government has both projected its power into rural societies to a high
degree and has established through laws,44 imihigo and extension services a top-down reor-
dering of people’s lives. The pervasive institutionalised imperative to at least meet growth
targets and if possible exceed them produces not only a strong developmental ambition but
also authoritarian state practice.45 There is evidence of peasants being instructed to conform
to a project with tacit rather than explicit consent and in these cases peasants might mistrust
or fear that government while ostensibly participating. In some cases crops have been dug
up or destroyed if they do not conform to development plans, peasants have been fined for
not growing the right crops and have even been beaten, incarcerated and threatened with
eviction after disobeying instructions.46

Assessing agrarian change

In sum, there are three facets in Rwanda’s agrarian strategy: a productivist developmental-
ism, a concern with general material well-being expressed centrally through cooperatives

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and a top-down statism which aims to reorder agrarian society. Progress in output levels
and chain integration and upgrading has been achieved within extremely difficult circum-
stances. However, whatever developmental progress one considers to have been achieved
raises questions about the rights and freedoms of peasants faced with a concerted and
determined set of state interventions.

let us start here by taking a step back. agrarian change within capitalist political econ-
omies does not mean moving through stages or following a model. There is no necessary
‘death of the peasantry’ or specific ‘articulation’ of a peasant mode of production. Historically
and theoretically agrarian change is diverse and open-ended. landlords can become capital-
ists, smallholders can become specialised commercial farmers, governments can implement
land reforms to create new peasantries, existing peasant farmers combine farming with
other income-earning activities, peasant societies can differentiate, generating increasing
amounts of wage labour within villages or rural regions, plantations can emerge or grow,
generating new forms of agrarian wage labour, traumatic events such as war or famine can
decimate peasant societies, changes in global markets can ‘re-peasantise’ (for want of a less
clumsy term) rural spaces, outgrower schemes can tie smallholders into contract farming,
and so on. as a meta-question, the agrarian question happily encompasses all these historical
processes within an ‘analysis of the place of small-scale petty commodity producing peasant
farming and rural labour in contemporary developing capitalist countries under the sway of
globalising capital and the ongoing expansion of capitalism in agriculture’.47

among a diversity of methodologies and specific framings of the agrarian question, there
is a core consensus to address this question through a historical materialist approach in
which accumulation is a social process that involves the (re)distribution of political authority,
technological change, changes in property relations, and considerable social contestation
concerning both the terms of social change and the capture of any benefits that accrue. as
such, we have a ready framework within which to understand the three facets of the GoR’s
response to its particular agrarian question as an integrated and complex whole – one which,
when put in historical context, is likely to highlight difficult, dirty and even ‘tragic’ charac-
teristics in agrarian change; one which is not predisposed to refer to a prelapsarian agrarian
condition or a counter-factual non-capitalist or ‘grassroots’ alternative.

The current agricultural strategy does directly address the historical circumstances of
Rwanda’s peasantry. It fixes clearly defined land tenure within the countryside,48 it (re)asserts
state power, it intervenes concertedly to promote increases in production and productiv-
ity, and the cooperative model aims to address the tension between small landholdings
and a scale of production that allows some peasants to ‘upgrade’ their market interactions.
although there has been some commandeering of land by the state and the dispossession
of swampland (previous used as common land) to lease to commercial interests, there has
not been a process of ‘land grabbing’ on a large scale. In Rwanda’s historical circumstances
it is difficult to identify a superior alternative strategy for agriculture without significantly
downplaying the difficult political circumstances of the country or without assuming that
there will be some kind of massive positive production response from smallholders without
the pervasive top-down reordering and material support that the state is pursuing. It is
perhaps significant that there is no extant modelling of what an alternative might look like,
although it is implied frequently in the literature that criticises the government’s authori-
tarian practices.49 From 1994 onwards, with an average landholding of less than a hectare
per household,50 and a generally adverse context for staple food production as a means

364 G. HaRRISoN

to generate wealth, in what ways might a stable process of expanded accumulation be
generated without strong state intervention of a kind broadly similar to that of the current
government? To my knowledge there is nothing in the research that addresses this question.

However, it is hardly sufficient simply to state that, in regard to Rwanda’s current agricul-
tural strategy ‘there is no alternative’ and then to resign oneself to whatever the ‘hard realities’
of agricultural development are. There is an important distinction between a realistic and
historically contextualised evaluation of Rwanda’s agrarian question and a consequential-
ism within which hardships and disruptions are justified by (anticipated) later outcomes.
This section engages with the academic literature on Rwanda’s agricultural development in
order to highlight the political tensions and equivocations within the country’s agricultural
development.

The strongest theme in the academic research on Rwanda’s agrarian societies since 1994
has been the reassertion of state authority over peasant societies. The common argument
in this literature is that state power has cowed peasants into a submissive state. Changes in
land ownership,51 the implementation of Gacaca hearings, the creation of imidugudu reset-
tlement villages, the ‘capture’ of cooperatives by government-aligned elites have all revealed
that agricultural development is in good part a project of state power projection into rural
societies.52 The outcome of this is that a fair amount of the literature takes on a certain kind
of political aesthetic in which peasants conform to state order but harbour within them a fear
and dislike of the government. This is most detailed in Thompson who, like others,53 relies on
the writing of James Scott to characterise rural power dynamics as a ‘high modernist’ state
against a peasantry that deploys the ‘weapons of the weak’ and ‘hidden transcripts’ that only
determined investigative research can get at.

The core of the critical concern within this literature is based in three inter-related argu-
ments: that the RPF government represses public identities based in ethnicity;54 that the
agrarian strategy it is pursuing leads to differentiation;55 and that it is authoritarian.56 In
its darkest formulation it implies to a recrudescence of mass violence.57 Inasmuch as it is a
critique of the RPF itself and its political choices, there is an implied – but not specified –
assumption that Rwanda’s agrarian question could be addressed differently.

let us make some comments not so much on the validity of these criticisms – which
are usually but not always backed up with strong research evidence – but on their import
and meaning, connecting back to the historically contextualised challenges of Rwanda’s
circumstances. First, it is difficult to imagine how the RPF, having defeated the rump of the
predecessor government which had carried out a genocide, would not aim to suppress
social identities based in ethnicity. There are some aspects of Rwanda’s politics of ethnicity
which are more troublesome than others, perhaps most germanely the difficulties the RPF
has in including the fact that tens of thousands of Hutu Rwandans died during the geno-
cide in its official memorialisations and its capacious interpretation of ‘genocide ideology’.
But the fact that it is effectively prohibited to make a public address that evokes ethnicity
seems altogether less easily understood as oppression. Many rural areas have had to work
through the return and resettlement of different groups whose migration was an outcome
of previous waves of ethnically defined violence. These waves have involved both Hutu
and Tutsi people. allocating land, houses, official positions, development resources and
contracts in the countryside have all been effected through strong state action purposefully
done through discourses of ‘Rwandanness’. Many of the people experiencing these forms
of state action still hold strong identifications as Tutsi and Hutu, although the nature of this

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THIRd WoRld QUaRTeRly 365

identity is hardly unchanging or antagonistic, as all the good research on Rwandan ethnicity
shows us.58 The re-emergence of ethnic populist discourses about Hutu subordination would
hardly be tolerable in Rwanda’s current circumstances. Historically multiparty competition
in Rwanda has always led to the mobilisation of ethnic identities, as well as to high levels of
tension and instability, what de lame calls ‘partisan polyphony’.59 The point here is simply
that a more ‘liberal’ approach to enduring ethnic tensions in Rwanda is, seen in historical
context, hardly a straightforwardly good idea.

The concern that Rwanda’s agricultural strategy is creating differentiation is central to an
evaluation of agricultural development. It is worth noting initially that the GoR has generated
three detailed surveys of socioeconomic categorisations (eICV) and used these categori-
sations to provide support for the poorest, for example through Girinka. Rural poverty has
fallen but not at a great pace. The GoR is currently prioritising concerns with malnutrition
and stunting which are – in a more comprehensive way than Girinka – aimed at the poorest
households (and especially children) within rural areas. Some research suggests that incomes
within cooperatives have improved,60 while case studies reveal differentiation and ‘control
grabs’.61 So a simple summary statement that the GoR wants to separate the ‘wheat from
the chaff ’ seems misplaced or pre-emptive.62 again, an insistent question that brings us to
address Rwanda’s concrete circumstances is: what kinds of strategy would make for a more
egalitarian rural transformation?

one answer to this question would be to sketch a less purposefully transformed small-
holder political economy within which new technologies are taken on gradually as and when
farmers consider it prudent to do so, the scaling-up or upgrading of production takes place
through the organic coming together of specific groups under their own motivation, and
land allocation continues to be effected through hybrid systems of inheritance and informal-
ised land markets. one can intuitively understand this as a pleasing political image, based
in peasant agency, complex and organic rural communities deciding their own destinies,
and so on. But one cannot expect that a relatively laissez-faire and reactive state strategy
would generate large production responses or create a broad and ambitious taking-up of
new crops, fertilisers, etc. It would also be less likely that private companies would invest as
much in agriculture. Rwanda’s smallholder agriculture is characterised by small landhold-
ings, low-productivity technologies and low incomes, and Rwanda’s rural communities are
not stable timeless collectivities but rather mixtures of new and old social ties tenaciously
trying to find modes of livelihood in the midst of enduring social trauma. In light of this, the
peasant populist approach – which has received its fair share of criticism even in wealthier
and less traumatised african countries – seems unlikely to generate positive responses to
Rwanda’s agrarian question.

In this context any Rwandan government that wishes to promote development and
growth will have to intervene heavily in peasant agriculture. This will involve impositions
on peasant farmers, some or many of which will be resented or conformed to out of admix-
tures of fatalism and a sense of powerlessness. But it might be more interesting and nuanced
to consider the nature of state intervention in agriculture not simply as the imposition of
authority (which it clearly is), (and in a sense of course it is) but as the interplay between
three kinds of process: the promotion of improved agricultural productivity and peasant
incomes; the inclusion of peasants in the ‘national project’ through collective works, meet-
ings, the provision of universal schooling and health insurance; and the penetration of rural
communities by the market through contractualised and governed chain integration.

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366 G. HaRRISoN

It is this author’s impression (from fieldwork in other east african countries and the existing
research on state–peasant relations) that peasant attitudes towards state power are sophis-
ticated and commonly entertain a formulation of a certain kind of tension or even paradox:
a desire not to be imposed upon by the state and an anxiety that the state might leave
them behind and as a result they might not get access to the benefits of ‘development’. This
might be considered a version of Polanyi’s ‘double movement’,63 a legitimacy constructed
on the tensions between promoting agrarian change and imposing state authority. It would
be pre-emptive and one-sided simply to bracket the development aspects off and focus
exclusively on state authoritarianism.

Conclusion

This article has argued that, in Rwanda’s specific historical context, and with a realistic under-
standing of the agrarian question and the possibilities that it offers for agrarian transition, the
current agricultural strategy displays the beginnings of an effective agricultural development
strategy. There is considerable debate and uncertainty concerning the practices that underpin
the realisation of this strategy: the authoritarian aspects of governance both underpin pur-
posive transformation and a general imposition of change on peasant farmers.64 But, within
the context of an agrarian question that recognises that development is a difficult process
of material progress, uncertainty and forceful political endeavour, it would be pre-emptive
to draw the conclusion that the authoritarian aspects of the GoR’s agricultural strategy mean
that it will fail, that better alternatives can easily be found, or that history is repeating itself.65

It is not at all self-evident that a more openly contested multiparty democracy would
improve peasants’ livelihoods or even given them significantly greater levels of participation
in governance. There is no easily identified grassroots approach to agriculture in Rwanda,
bearing in mind the social traumas of the recent past, the density of settlement and the
lack of unused land. In light of this, the serious concerns about peasants’ lack of power or
the top-down practices of the Rwandan state are means to think through the problems
with existing policies and to consider how those practices might be changed. Processes
like crop intensification, the zoning of crop production and villagisation are not complete
(although some of the literature implies that they are); like all processes of development,
agrarian transformation is a matter of decades not years. There is the political and practical
possibility that the current strategy, accompanied by more state action in some areas, less
in others and more flexibility throughout would frame Rwanda’s agrarian question in the
most positive way that one can reasonably expect. This is not to say that this will happen, or
to defend the government unequivocally. It is simply to recognise Rwanda’s realities and the
nature of capitalist development, and to choose to see the future as not entirely foreclosed.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the interviewees in Rwanda, who were very generous with their time. I am also very grateful
for referees’ comments.

Notes

on contributor

Graham Harrison is a professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is an editor of Review of
african Political economy and New Political economy. He has published five books on various aspects

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of africa and development as well as numerous articles. He is currently researching Rwanda’s devel-
opment and broader models of capitalist transformation in africa.

Notes
1. akram-lodhi and Kay, “Surveying the agrarian Question,” 257.
2. akram-lodhi and Kay go on to identify seven distinct formulations of the agrarian question.

See also Bernstein, “agrarian Questions Then and Now.”
3. Vogel, “The Tragedy of History”; Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism; and Cramer, Civil War

is Not a Stupid Thing. It is no coincidence that some of the best research on the causes and
dynamics of civil war are analyses of crises in agrarian social relations.

4. Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing.
5. Bernstein, “Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’.”
6. Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression.
7. Newbury and Newbury, “Bringing the Peasants Back In.”
8. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis; and Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.
9. Newbury, “Returning Refugees.”
10. Newbury, “Returning refugees,” 270ff. The dRC was at the time the recently independent

Republic of the Congo, later renamed Zaire (1971) by President Mobutu. It became the dRC
in 1997.

11. The notion of ‘Hutu power’ returned ominously in the build-up to the genocide.
12. Verwimp, Peasants in Power.
13. Uvin, “difficult Choices.”
14. andre and Platteau, “land Relations under Unbearable Stress.”
15. de lame, A Hill among a Thousand.
16. Chossudovsky, Globalization of Poverty; and Storey, “Structural adjustment.”
17. Storey, “economics and ethnic Conflict,” 49.
18. lonsdale, “Moral ethnicity and Political Tribalism.” detailed accounts of this period tend to

portray Habyarimana as losing power to a political elite based in the northwest, focused
around the city of Gisenyi and the social affinities of Mme agathe Habyarimana, the president’s
wife.

19. one manifestation of this was the fact that, as men were mobilised to kill, leaders would
often deploy agrarian metaphors about work and cutting. although guns were distributed
throughout the country, the main weapon of the genocide was the iconic farming tool, the
machete. The ‘work’ metaphor came out in the narratives of former génocidaires in Hatzfield,
Machete Season.

20. The genocide commenced in Kigali with the killings of the politically liberal Hutu elite and
Tutsi people in general.

21. Hatzfield, Machete Season; and Straus, The Order of Genocide. Interahamwe is variously
translated from Kinyarwanda – usually as ‘those who hunt together’ – and refers to the
genocidal militias.

22. Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards.
23. andre and Platteau, “land Relations under Unbearable Stress.”
24. Relatedly, see Hickey, “Beyond ‘Poverty Reduction’.”
25. Golooba-Mutebi, The Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa, 2; and van Hoywegen,

“The Urgency,” 354.
26. Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards, 109.
27. In the years after the genocide aid to Rwanda was fairly limited and in fact more resources

were probably going to the refugee camps in the dRC and therefore to some degree to the
remaining génocidaire militias.

28. Marysse et al., “The aid ‘darlings’ and ‘orphans’”; and Uvin, “difficult Choices.”
29. Gacaca is a neo-traditional open-hearing process that aimed to process those suspected

of participating in the genocide through confessionals, testament and decisions by locally
selected judges. The best overview of Gacaca’s fortunes is Clark, The Gacaca Courts; and Clark,
“Negotiating Reconciliation in Rwanda.”

368 G. HaRRISoN

30. Huggins, “land Grabbing and land Tenure Security”; and Kimanuka, Sub-Saharan Africa’s
Development Challenges. at times Singapore was referred to analogously, and the president
from 2000 onwards, Paul Kagame, was personally influence by the writings of lee Kwan yew.

31. IFad, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 2.
32. The percentage of those living in absolute poverty declined from 56.7% to 44.9% between

2006/7 and 2010/11 and there was a reduction in the Gini coefficient from 0.52 to 0.49. UNdP,
Rwanda, 16. These are national figures but bearing in mind that about 85% of Rwanda’s
population live in rural areas, it seems reasonable to assume that national changes in inequality
and poverty are reflected in rural areas. See ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?”;
and IFad, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project.

33. Vinck, Rwanda Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis.
34. IFad, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 1.
35. ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?,” 8.
36. IFad, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 2.
37. Huggins, “land Grabbing and land Tenure Security.” Villagisation in these three countries

involved millions of people being relocated into large grid-like villages of thousands of people,
whereas imidugudu villages are smaller, less rigidly planned and more often connected to
administrative and social provision.

38. Verhofstadt and Maertens, Cooperative Membership and Agricultural Performance, 8.
39. a fascinating contrasting case study of cooperative development is ansoms et al., “The

Reorganization of Rural Space in Rwanda.”
40. These joint programmes are funded by the World Bank.
41. See ansoms, “Re-engineering Rural Society,” 305–308.
42. van Hoywegen, “The Urgency of land and agrarian Reform”; and de lame, A Hill among a

Thousand, 42.
43. The GoR has moved from monopolising the importation of fertiliser to a licensing of imports and

a maintenance of standards in fertilisers. It is currently moving towards a regulated competitive
market in fertiliser importation and retail.

44. Most importantly decentralisation of local government and the land laws issued in after the
cadastral survey and registration of land.

45. ansoms, “Re-engineering Rural Society.”
46. ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?,” 17; and Pritchard, “land, Power and Peace.”
47. Hakram-lodhi and Kay, “‘Surveying the agrarian Question,” 179.
48. Through legislation and a comprehensive cadastral survey.
49. ansoms et al. argue for a strategy of ‘broad-based growth founded on small-scale agricultural

activity’. ansoms et al., “The Reorganization of Rural Space in Rwanda,” 181. But it is at this
point that the narrative moves away from Rwanda’s situation to outline a general set of points
relating to pro-smallholder approaches.

50. Fifty per cent of rural households currently farm less than 0.5 hectares. Golooba-Mutebi, Political
Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa, 2. ‘Mirroring the rise in population density over the last
forty years from 121 to over 350 persons per square kilometre, the national average land parcel
size has dropped from 2 ha in 1960 to 0.35 in 2007.’ Pritchard, “land, Power and Peace,” 188.

51. leegwater, “Sharing Scarcity.”
52. Huggins, “‘Control Grabbing and Small-scale agricultural Intensification.”
53. Thompson, Whispering Truth to Power; leegwater, “Sharing Scarcity”; and Purdekova, “Rendering

Rwanda Governable.”
54. Chakravarty, “Navigating the Middle Ground.”
55. ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?”
56. Reyntjens, Political Governance.
57. des Forges, “land in Rwanda.”
58. Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression; and des Forges, Defeat is the only Bad News.
59. de lame, A Hill among a Thousand, 468.
60. Verhofstadt and Maertens, Cooperative Membership, 14.
61. Huggins, “land Grabbing and land Tenure Security.”

THIRd WoRld QUaRTeRly 369

62. des Forges, “land in Rwanda.”
63. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
64. Pritchard, “land, Power and Peace.”
65. as is implied in Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards, 124ff.

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http://www.oecd.org/countries/rwanda/41105593

• Abstract

Introduction
The agrarian question: the political economy of constraint
The agrarian question in Rwanda
Historical context
Rwanda’s agrarian strategy
Assessing Rwanda’s agricultural strategy
The prioritisation of agriculture
From growth to transformation: agricultural chains
Assessing agrarian change
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes on contributor
Notes
Bibliography

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Global Food Security

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gfs

Not just for the wealthy: Rethinking farmed fish consumption in the Global
South

Ben Beltona,⁎, Simon R. Bushb, David C. Littlec

a Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, Michigan State University, 446 W Circle Dr, East Lansing, MI 4

88

24, United States
b Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 8130, 6700 EW,

T

he Netherlands
c Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O

Keywords:
Aquaculture
Domestic consumption
Diet transformation
Food security
Fish

A B S T R A C T

Aquaculture’s contributions to food security in the Global South are widely misunderstood. Dominant narratives
suggest that aquaculture contributes mainly to international trade benefiting richer Northern consumers, or
provides for wealthy urban consumers in Southern markets. On the supply side, the literature promotes an
idealized vision of ‘small-scale’, low input, semi-subsistence farming as the primary means by which aquaculture
can contribute to food security, or emphasizes the role of ‘industrial’ export oriented aquaculture in undermining
local food security. In fact, farmed fish is produced predominantly by a ‘missing middle’ segment of commercial
and increasingly intensive farms, and overwhelmingly remains in Southern domestic markets for consumption
by poor and middle income consumers in both urban and rural areas, making an important but underappreciated
contribution to global food security.

1. Introduction

Fish1 is a rich source of vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and high
quality protein, playing an essential role in the diets of billions of
consumers, many of them poor, malnourished and living in low and
middle income countries (Thilsted et al., 2016; HLPE, 2014;
Kawarazuka and Béné, 2011).

Fish utilized for human consumption is obtained from a continuum
of sources running from capture fisheries (the harvest of naturally re-
producing fish populations), to aquaculture (breeding and farming
under controlled conditions). Global capture fisheries output peaked in
the mid-19

90

s, and has plateaued or declined since (cf. FAO, 2016a;
Pauly and Zeller, 2016). In contrast, aquaculture has boomed, growing
at an average rate of 8.2% per annum over the past three decades. As a
result, farming now provides more than half of the fish destined for
direct human consumption (FAO, 2016b).

The growth trajectories of capture fisheries and aquaculture are
often juxtaposed to make the case that sustained and rapid aquaculture
development is vital to the future food security of fish dependent po-
pulations in Southern nations (e.g. Barange et al., 2014).

A counter-narrative (which we term ‘economic geography’), holds
that aquaculture largely fails to meet the needs of poor and

undernourished Southern consumers. The narrative asserts that most
farmed fish produced in Southern countries is destined for export to
Northern markets (McIntyre et al., 2016; Ponte et al., 2014), and that
farmed fish remaining in domestic markets is consumed primarily by
wealthy urbanites (Beveridge et al., 2013; Bush, 2004; Ahmed and
Lorica, 2002; Lewis, 1997). A related argument is that aquaculture
production is concentrated in Asia and does little to address the needs
of malnourished populations in Africa (Hall et al., 2013; Golden et al.,
2016).

A second pair of narratives sets up contrasting visions around
aquaculture’s supply side. The first emphasizes the predominance and
desirability of low intensity ‘small-scale’ fish farming that contributes
directly to household food security and producer incomes (e.g. Bondad-
Reantaso and Subasinghe, 2013). The second frames environmental
degradation and social dislocation associated with the rise of ‘in-
dustrial’ export-oriented aquaculture as compromising the food security
of communities in Southern fish producing nations (e.g. Nayak and
Berkes, 2011; van Mulekom et al., 2006).

We argue that despite their influence in shaping science, policy and
popular perceptions, none of these narratives adequately account for
the current diversity of aquaculture in the Global South, nor its ag-
gregate ‘macro’ effects on food security. The remainder of this paper

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2017.10.005
Received 9 March 2017; Received in revised form 2 October 2017; Accepted 27 October 2017

⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: beltonbe@msu.edu (B. Belton).

1 The terms ‘fish’, ‘aquatic animals’ and ‘seafood’ are used interchangeably as a shorthand for edible aquatic animals. Aquatic plants, algae, non-edible aquatic animals (e.g. corals,
sponges), and aquatic mammals, are excluded all calculations in the paper.

Global Food Security 16 (2018) 85–

92

2211-

91

24/ Published by Elsevier B.V.

T

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22119124

https://www.elsevier.com/locate/gfs

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2017.10.005

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2017.10.005

mailto:beltonbe@msu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2017.10.005

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.gfs.2017.10.005&domain=pdf

makes this case.
First we demonstrate that, contrary to the focus on international

trade, farmed fish is overwhelmingly consumed domestically in
Southern aquaculture-producing nations, and is increasingly widely
available and readily accessible to low-income urban and rural con-
sumers in these markets. Second, we address supply side arguments by
challenging the dominant narratives linking aquaculture and food se-
curity and the prescriptions for promoting aquaculture that arise from
them. We conclude by highlighting the need for future research and
policy to pay closer attention to existing patterns of aquaculture de-
velopment and their contributions to Southern food security.

2. International trade vs. domestic consumption

Seafood is among the most highly internationally traded food
commodities (e.g. Asche et al., 2015; Tveterås et al., 2012). Fish and
shellfish exports from developing countries exceed the value of coffee,
rubber, cocoa, tea, tobacco, meat, and rice combined (Smith et al.,
2010) and trade in fish products accounts for 10% of all agricultural
exports (Gephart et al., 2016). In 2012, 37% of global fish production
was exported (Kobayashi et al., 2015), with an estimated value of $129
billion (HLPE, 2014).

The scale of the international seafood trade and its apparent ten-
dency to move large quantities of fish away from poor food insecure
Southern nations to wealthy food surplus countries renders it con-
troversial (HLPE, 2014). For example, Smith et al. (2010) contrast the
status of large net exporters of seafood (e.g. China, Indonesia, Vietnam,
Thailand, India, and Myanmar) possessing moderate to high levels of
undernourishment, with the largest net importing markets (e.g. the
United States and European Union), which are wealthy and well-
nourished.

Asche et al. (2015) and Béné et al. (2015a) provide thorough sy-
nopses of the debate over whether international trade in seafood has
positive or negative effects on fish consumption and poverty. Our intent
in the present paper is not to contribute to the literature on seafood
trade. Rather, we argue that an emphasis on international trade has
obscured the contributions made by farmed fish to domestic food se-
curity in the main Southern aquaculture producing countries.

To demonstrate this point, we estimate the volume of fish origi-
nating from aquaculture and capture fisheries that are traded inter-
nationally, or remain in country for domestic consumption, for the ten
largest aquaculture producing developing countries in the world –
Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, the Philippines,

Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam (FAO, 2016a). Together these coun-
tries accounted for

87

% of global production of farmed aquatic animals
and 43% of global capture fisheries landings in 2013. They were also
home to 51% of the global population, and 52% of all malnourished
individuals (Table 1).

The trade component of the FAO Fishstat J database (FAO, 2016b),
on which we base our analysis, does not specify whether internationally
traded seafood products originate from capture fisheries or aquaculture.
Following the methodology set out by Bush et al. (2013), we estimated
the share of internationally traded aquatic animal products derived
from each source, working on the assumption that the shares of farmed
and wild fish species groups in exports from each country are propor-
tional to the shares of farmed and wild fish of these species groups in
national production.2

National fish production is reported by FAO in live weight equiva-
lents (the weight of freshly harvested fish prior to any processing). The
quantity of fish products traded internationally is reported in nominal
terms – i.e. as the volume of fish traded post-processing (if any). To
estimate the live weight equivalent (LWE) of each internationally
traded product listed in Fishstat J we assigned conversion factors for
similar categories of product, obtained from published sources (FAO,
2015; Bush et al., 2013; European Commission, 2011; Tacon et al.,
2006). For each country, reported aquaculture production was divided
by the apparent LWE of aquaculture exports to estimate the share of
farmed fish exported and the share remaining as domestic food supply.
The same procedure was followed for capture fisheries production and
exports.

Fig. 1, reveals the extent to which excessive focus on international
trade in seafood has inflated perceptions of its significance. The vast
majority of fish farmed and landed in the ten most important Southern
aquaculture producing nations is not exported. Eighty-nine percent of
the farmed fish produced in these countries is consumed in their do-
mestic markets. The share of capture fisheries landings exported is al-
most double that of farmed fish, and exceeds that of aquaculture in
seven of the ten countries, but is still modest at 22%.

In eight of the ten countries, apparent domestic consumption of

Table 1
Population, undernourishment, and aquaculture and fisheries production for selected countries.

Country Population
(millions)a

Prevalence of Undernourishment
(% of population)a,b

Undernourished
population (millions)c

Aquaculture
production (t)d

Capture fisheries
production (t)d

Aquaculture as a share of
fish production (%)

Bangladesh 161 16 26 1,859,808 1,550,446 55
Brazil 208 5 10 472,829 765,287 38
China 1371 9 123 42,694,335 16,274,939 72
Egypt 92 5 5 1,097,544 356,858 75
India 1311 15 197 4,549,607 4,645,182 49
Indonesia 258 8 21 3,819,517 6,103,001 38
Myanmar 54 14 8 926,175 3,7

86

,840 20
Philippines 101 14 14 815,008 2,335,004 26
Thailand 68 7 5 1,052,701 1,843,747 36
Vietnam 92 11 10 3,203,326 2,803,800 53
Subtotal 3714 418 60,490,850 40,465,104 60
World 7347 11 808 69,296,511 93,763,656 42
Subtotal as share of

world (%)
51 n/a 52 87 43 n/a

Notes:
a World Bank (2016).
b Undernourishment refers to the percentage of the population whose food intake is insufficient to meet dietary energy requirements continuously.
c Calculated from data in columns 2 and 3.
d Production data for 2013 (FAO, 2016b).

2 At the country level, production data were categorized by the “ISSCAAP species
groups” reported by FAO. Exports were categorized by “ISSCAAP commodity divisions”.
Species divisions and commodity divisions were then combined under five aggregate
“ISSCAAP commodity groups” (crustaceans, freshwater and diadromous fishes, marine
fishes, miscellaneous aquatic animals, and molluscs, including cephalopods) to enable
comparison across countries and product categories. The complete dataset used, including
all calculations, is available for download (see Belton et al., 2017b).

B. Belton et al. Global Food Security 16 (2018) 85–92

86

farmed fish exceeds 90% of total national aquaculture production. Only
in Thailand and Vietnam do aquaculture exports exceed domestic
consumption. Both these countries are also major exporters of capture
fisheries products, and have fish supplies per capita well in excess of the
global average of 20.1 kg, at 24.8 kg/capita/year and 32.7 kg/capita/
year, respectively (FAO, 2016a, 2016c). Their seafood exports are
surplus to domestic consumption needs, and do not divert food away
from consumers at home.

To address the possibility that extrapolating the proportion of
aquaculture and capture production to exports could bias results, we
performed an alternative calculation using the most conservative as-
sumptions possible with respect to aquaculture’s contribution to do-
mestic fish supplies. For this estimate, for each country, we attributed
100% of exports to aquaculture in species groups where production of
farmed fish exceeded exports. For species groups where export volumes
exceeded farmed fish production, we assumed that 100% of farmed fish
was exported, with capture fisheries making up the gap between farmed
fish production and total exports. Our original and alternate estimates
are presented together in Table 2. The alternate estimate has little
impact on the overall results: even under the most stringent assump-
tions, domestic consumption of farmed fish equals or exceeds 90% of
production in seven countries and stands at 84% in one more, with only
15% of farmed fish exported overall.

These results are supported by data presented in FAO (2016a),

indicating that freshwater fish (by far the most important category of
fish produced in the ten selected countries) account for just 4.8% of
international trade in fish by volume. Shrimp (the second most im-
portant species group produced in the ten countries) makes up 6% of
world seafoood trade. In contrast, marine fish, which originate over-
whelmingly from capture fisheries, account for 68.7% of global trade.

3. New geographies of consumption

The ‘economic geography’ critique of aquaculture’s contribution to
food security is epitomized by Golden et al. (2016), who state that fish
farmed in the Global South is, “mostly exported to the wealthy coun-
tries of Europe and North America, or consumed by the growing
middle-classes in the megacities of these economies” (p. 318).
Beveridge et al. (2013, p. 1075) also hypothesize that “aquaculture
producers in developing countries tend to target the production of
larger-sized fish, aimed at middle-class urban regional and international
markets, presumably in the expectation that the higher absolute and
relative prices such fish command increase profits”.

Analysis presented in the previous section undermines the claim
that aquaculture is strongly export oriented. The following subsection
provides evidence that farmed fish produced for Southern domestic
markets is now widely accessible to low-income rural and urban con-
sumers. The changing characteristics of urban and rural demand, and

Fig. 1. Aquaculture and capture fisheries exports and apparent
domestic consumption in selected countries (2011). Source:
Authors’ calculations from FAO (2016b). (This analysis is based
on data for 2011, the most recent year for which both production
and trade data was available in the Fishstat J database).

Table 2
Estimates of aquaculture’s contribution to domestic consumption and exports in selected countries (2011).
Source: Authors’ calculations from FAO (2016b).

Item Bangladesh Brazil China Egypt India Indonesia Myanmar Philippines Thailand Vietnam Total

Total aquaculture production (million t) 1.52 0.44 38.62 0.99 3.67 2.72 0.82 0.77 1.20 2.85 53.59
Exports (first estimate)

Total aquaculture exports (estimated LWE) (t) 60,475 2993 2,918,521 5985 193,093 231,391 36,613 19,187 935,535 1,681,781 6,085,575
Share of exports in aquaculture production

(%)
4 1 8 1 5 9 4 3 78 59 11

Share of aquaculture consumed domestically
(%)

96 99 92 99 95 91 96 97 22 41

89

Exports (second estimate)
Total aquaculture exports (estimated LWE) (t) 130,071 5782 4,005,385 10,820 361,248 429,382 66,510 40,070 837,868 1,895,821 7,782,956
Share of exports in aquaculture production

(%)
9 1 10 1 10 16 8 5 70 67 15

Share of aquaculture consumed domestically
(%)

91 99 90 99 90 84 92 95 30 33 85

B. Belton et al. Global Food Security 16 (2018) 85–92
87

the effects of aquaculture on fish price stability and supply are also
examined.

3.1. Access and availability

Contrary to the prevailing view, aquaculture produces a wide range
of species of low or moderate market value. Reports from the early
stages of aquaculture development in Bangladesh indicated a bias to-
ward producing high value Indian major carps that were not accessible
to the rural poor (Lewis, 1997). However, although Lewis’ observation
accurately reflected the situation in the mid-1990s, by 2011 three low
value farmed species (pangasius, silver carp and tilapia) were each
eaten in greater quantities in Bangladesh than rohu (the most popular
Indian major carp) or any single species of fish originating from capture
fisheries (Hernandez et al., 2017).

Low value farmed fish species now dominate or make large con-
tributions to domestic fish supply in most of the 10 countries assessed
above (e.g. tilapia and walking catfish in Thailand and Indonesia, silver
carp in China, tilapia in Egypt, pangasius in India). At the same time,
production of more expensive carnivorous species in these countries has
often stagnated at low levels (e.g. barramundi and grouper in Thailand,
Indonesia and Vietnam). Given that the vast majority of consumers in
these countries belong to low or middle income brackets, such a pattern
is to be expected. Aquaculture could not have sustained its extreme
growth rate over the last three decades if it catered only to demand
from a small wealthy segment of consumers.

Aquaculture’s growth has driven down the real price of most farmed
fish species produced in large volumes, making them increasingly ac-
cessible to lower income consumers. The tendency for supply to in-
crease and production to remain profitable even as prices fall, is the
result of productivity growth arising from improvements in efficiency
(Asche et al., 2009). This pattern has been a defining feature of the
global aquaculture boom over the past 30 years.

Examples of declines in the real price of farmed fish are numerous.
In Egypt, from 2000 to 2010 inflation adjusted prices fell by 46% for
catfish, 38% for tilapia, and 31% for mullet (Macfadyen et al., 2011).
International prices for tilapia and pangasius fillets fell by around 40%
from 1995 to 2007 and 2002 to 2007, respectively (Asche et al., 2009).
Nominal prices received by carp farmers in India’s main producing
state, Andhra Pradesh, remained roughly constant from the mid-1980s
to 2014, representing a huge reduction in real price (Belton et al.,
2017a).

Depletion of wild fish stocks has been another driver of aquacul-
ture’s growth. Pervasive habitat degradation and overexploitation of
fish stocks have caused declines in the supply per capita of fish from
inland and marine capture fisheries in major aquaculture producing
countries. Non-farmed fish have become increasingly expensive, both in
real terms and relative to farmed fish, often reversing their relative
accessibility to consumers. For example, in Myanmar the price of sna-
kehead and hilsa (two of the most important species harvested from
inland and marine capture fisheries, respectively) increased at an
average rate of 2.9% and 5.5% each year from 2008 to 2014. In con-
trast, the real price of rohu, the main species farmed, fell at an average
rate of 0.5% per annum (Belton et al., 2015).

In Bangladesh, the average real price of fish from inland capture
fisheries increased 4% between 2000 and 2010, while that of marine
capture fish jumped 42%. The average price of farmed fish fell over this
period, to become 10% cheaper than the inland capture fish that once
dominated supply (Toufique et al., 2017). A similar pattern is illu-
strated in Fig. 2. From January 2012 to June 2015 the nominal price of
Bangladesh’s four main farmed fish species remained fairly constant. In
contrast, the price of two formerly cheap and abundant small fish
species harvested from inland capture fisheries (puti and mola) rose, to
exceed of all but one of the main farmed species by the end of the
period. These trends are linked to a 35% reduction in the consumption
of inland capture fish by extreme-poor households and 37% reduction
in consumption by non-poor households in Bangladesh from 2000 to
2010. In contrast the consumption of farmed fish increased 152% and
88% for the same groups over this period (Toufique and Belton, 2014).

3.2. Urbanization and shifting patterns of demand

Contrary to assumptions implicit in the economic geography nar-
rative, food security is no longer solely, or even predominantly, a rural
concern. The share of urban dwellers already exceeds those in rural
areas, and is expected to rise to 66% by 2050, fueling unprecedented
urban demand for food (Chicago Council, 2016). Many urban in-
habitants in Southern countries, even among the middle classes, occupy
precarious positions. For example, sixty percent of Africa’s 350 million
strong middle class is considered vulnerable to slipping back into
poverty, and thus food insecurity (Chicago Council, 2016). Results from
the Gallup World Poll’s ‘Food Insecurity Experience Scale’ survey reflect
this urban precarity. Respondents in urban areas of Asia feel more food
insecure than those in rural areas – a difference of about three

Fig. 2. Average monthly nominal retail prices of four farmed
and two non-farmed fish species in Bangladesh, January
2012-May 2015. Note: Non-farm species identified by dashed
line. Source: Unpublished data collected by WorldFish on a
weekly basis from 25 rural and urban retail markets in six districts
in South, Southwest, North and Northwest Bangladesh.

B. Belton et al. Global Food Security 16 (2018) 85–92
88

percentage points for Asia as a whole (21% in rural areas versus 24% in
urban), and eight percentage points in South Asia (FAO, 2016b).

Demand for non-staple foods in Southern cities is growing in line
with ‘Bennett’s Law’ – that the proportion of calories derived from
starchy staples falls with rising income as consumers diversify the food
consumption bundle to include higher-priced calories (Timmer et al.,
1983). As a result, the share of food expenditure allocated to fruits,
vegetables, meat, dairy and fish rises disproportionately with income
(Reardon et al., 2014). By virtue of higher average urban incomes and
the increasingly large share of urban inhabitants in the population,
demand for food is highly concentrated in urban areas, which already
account for 65% of the value of the entire Asian food economy
(Reardon and Timmer, 2014). This means that demand for all fish – both
farmed and wild – is greater in urban areas than rural.

However, the gap in consumption of animal proteins between urban
and rural consumers is now smaller than is generally understood. Cross-
country analysis of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal and Vietnam shows
that urban dwellers in all four countries consume approximately 50%
more animal source foods (meat and fish combined) than rural dwellers
(Reardon et al., 2014). In China, urban consumers in the poorest wealth
quartile (i.e. the poorest 25% of the urban population) eat 40% more
fish than the poorest quartile of rural consumers, while the difference
between urban and rural consumers across the other quartiles ranges
from 21% to 25% (calculated from Chui et al., 2013). In Bangladesh,
the difference between urban and rural fish consumption is smaller still,
with urban consumers eating 12% more farmed fish and 17% more fish
from inland capture fisheries than those in rural areas (Toufique et al.,
2017).

Price elasticities for fish of all types tend to be high – estimated at
0.8 on average, with a range of 0.31–1.04 by Naylor (2016) – and are
larger for poor consumers than for the better-off. For example, the price
elasticity of farmed fish in Bangladesh is reported to range from 0.78 to
1.29 for non-poor and extreme-poor consumers, respectively (Toufique
et al., 2017). The poor are therefore more responsive to increases (or
decreases) in fish prices than the wealthy, as also demonstrated by Dey
et al. (2008) in a cross-country analysis of fish consumption in Ban-
gladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka,
Thailand and Vietnam. Rural consumers (who are poorer on average
than urban) therefore have most to lose from increases in the price of
non-farmed fish that accompany the contraction of wild supply, and
most to gain, proportionately, from declines in the price of farmed fish
that accompany the expansion of aquaculture.

The income elasticity of demand for fish is also relatively high; re-
ported as −0.64 by Naylor (2016), and ranging from −0.44 to −0.51
for non-poor and extreme-poor consumers for farmed fish in Bangla-
desh (Toufique et al., 2017). This tendency contributes to increasing
demand for fish in economies where incomes are rising.

3.3. Price stability

The growth of aquaculture has stabilized fish prices. Food price
stability is particularly important for the food security of poor con-
sumers, for whom food expenditures constitute a large share of total
income (Troell et al., 2014). Farmed fish prices are about half as volatile
as those of wild fish on average, reflecting the seasonally variable and
often unpredictable nature of fisheries, and the high degree of control
over the timing of the production process that is possible in aquaculture
(Asche et al., 2015). This pattern is illustrated by Fig. 2, which shows
much greater seasonal fluctuations in the price of two the non-farmed
species than the four cultured ones.

As aggregate production from capture fisheries appears to have
reached the maximum level that can be sustained, increasing demand
for wild fish can only increase prices further. However, because the
supply of fish from aquaculture has kept pace with demand, substitu-
tion has dampened price pressure on wild fish as demand has spilled
over to farmed species, partially reigning in divergence in the prices of

farmed and wild fish over time (Tveterås et al., 2012).
This finding has profound implications for food and nutrition se-

curity. Rashid et al. (2016) calculate that if aquaculture had stopped
growing in 1980, global fish supply per capita in 2013 would have been
about half of the actual supply in that year, and 17% less than it was in
1980. As these authors note, “the consequences of such a scenario are
easy to imagine: higher prices, lower consumption, and far greater
pressure on marine and inland capture fisheries.” The adverse con-
sequences would have been particularly severe in Asia (Rashid et al.,
2016, p. 1). In other words, the poor in our ten countries would eat far
less fish of any kind – wild or farmed – were it not for the growth of
aquaculture.

4. Transforming farmed fish supply

Production of farmed fish is as subject to misinterpretation as its
consumption. Two narratives dominate development focussed aqua-
culture science and policy. The first extolls the benefits of low intensity
‘small-scale’ aquaculture for promoting food security. The second cri-
tiques ‘industrial’ forms of production, particularly shrimp farming, for
undermining it. Reducing aquaculture to the idealized binary categories
of ‘small-scale’ and ‘industrial’ has obscured the contributions of a very
large intermediate segment of producers, existing along a gradient be-
tween these two poles. This ‘missing middle’ has emerged in response to
the changing patterns of demand and diet transformation outlined
above, as part of a broader ‘quiet revolution’ in agri-food supply chains
that is taking place in most of Asia and parts of Africa (Hernandez et al.,
2017). Failure to acknowledge the role played by this set of producers
has resulted in ineffective prescriptions for food security focused
aquaculture development.

4.1. Polarized production narratives

Promotors of small-scale aquaculture emphasize the cumulative
impact and positive nature of the contributions such farms make to food
security. For instance, the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security
and Nutrition (HLPE, 2014) asserts that 70–80% of aquaculture pro-
duction originates from small-scale farming. Such pronouncements are
commonplace (e.g. Tacon et al., 2010; De Silva and Davy, 2010) and
form a central tenet of the conventional wisdom on aquaculture. But
they are also unsubstantiated – there is no global database of fish farm
sizes and characteristics to provide an empirical basis for this claim.

Small-scale aquaculture is generally represented in the literature as
low intensity (utilizing limited external feed inputs), and/or integrated
with other agricultural systems. As such, it is seen as ecologically effi-
cient in terms of a reliance on low trophic level fish species, limited
dependence on nutrient inputs, and integration with components of
terrestrial farming systems (e.g. through use of crop processing wastes
or manures available on farm as feeds or fertilizers, or the stocking of
fish in rice fields) (Edwards et al., 2002). The contribution of small-
scale aquaculture to food security is usually framed in terms of meeting
the subsistence fish consumption needs of rural households, and the
generation of supplemental incomes through sales of small marketable
surpluses that may be spent on purchases of other food items (e.g.
Ahmed and Lorica, 2002).

The ‘small-scale’ narrative has provided the basis for promotion of
aquaculture by overseas development projects throughout the tropics
for more than 30 years. The assumption that small-scale aquaculture is
underdeveloped globally and should be supported as a key strategy for
improving food and nutrition security in developing economies is per-
sistent. Golden et al. (2016, p. 139) argue for instance that, “when
explicitly planned to improve local well-being, aquaculture can be a
crucial contribution to local diets and economies … less-intensive and
more-diverse forms of aquaculture may have the most potential to meet
the nutrition and food-security needs of the poor”.

Literature at the opposite end of the narrative spectrum focusses on

B. Belton et al. Global Food Security 16 (2018) 85–92
89

the role of intensive, industrial aquaculture in undermining local food
security. Work on ‘industrial aquaculture’ emphasizes in particular the
role that export oriented shrimp aquaculture has played in “threatening
both domestic food security and the economic opportunities of local
communities” (van Mulekom et al., 2006, p. 546). Studies of shrimp
farming provide evidence of a variety of social and environmental im-
pacts on local food security, including reduced agricultural production
arising of the salinization of rice-dominated terrestrial farming systems
(e.g. Paprocki and Cons, 2014); displacement of small-scale capture
fisheries from coastal lagoons (Nayak and Berkes, 2011); and, de-
struction of mangroves (a critical nursery habitat for wild fish) to make
way for shrimp ponds (e.g. Hamilton and Lovette, 2015). These pro-
cesses have been a recurrent feature of shrimp farm development in
many locations, particularly during ‘boom’ periods.

However, both small-scale and industrial narratives have a tendency
to confuse the specific characteristics of their subject matter with the
generalized attributes of the entire global aquaculture sector. The
small-scale aquaculture narrative vastly overstates the importance of
the idealized small, low input, integrated farm. Similarly, the industrial
aquaculture narrative often extrapolates from negative food security
impacts arising from local struggles over resources that characterize
production of specific commodities in specific places and specific times,
to divine the aggregate effects of global farmed fish production.

4.2. The missing middle

Contrary to the polarized narratives presented above, empirical
evidence points to most global aquaculture output originating from a
‘missing middle’ segment of producers, characterized by five features.
They are: (1) highly commercially oriented; (2) span a broad spectrum
of scales of production; (3) utilize a diverse range of production tech-
nologies (but are increasingly intensifying through use of pelleted
feeds); (4) produce multiple, predominantly low and medium value,
species and; (5) have emerged in an unplanned manner in response to
opportunities created by changing patterns of demand.

For example, Chinese farms producing carps and tilapia are almost
entirely commercial, with more than 95% using manufactured feeds,
and produce fish in polycultures that contain an average mix of four to
six fish species (Chiu et al., 2013). In Andhra Pradesh, India, the lo-
cation of the largest concentration of freshwater fish farms outside
China, aquaculture is dominated by semi-intensive carp and pellet-fed
pangasius polycultures, oriented entirely to the market and spanning a
spectrum of farm sizes from small to very large (Belton et al., 2017a). In
Bangladesh, a recent survey of 2678 farms identified 14 distinct pro-
duction technologies, all of them polycultures, producing a combined
total of 54 different species of fish and crustaceans. Production is
dominated by carps, tilapia and pangasius. While overwhelmingly
below 2 ha in size, farms are strongly commercially oriented, gen-
erating large marketed surpluses (Jahan et al., 2015). In Egypt’s Nile
Delta, the mean size of tilapia farms is 6 ha, 94% of farms use pelleted
feeds, and 100% of farms sell their product to domestic wholesale
markets (Eltholth et al., 2015). Aquaculture in other major Southern
producer countries possesses similar characteristics. For example, a
recent report synthesizing case studies from Bangladesh, Chile,
Ecuador, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, Viet Nam and Zambia,
concluded that ‘small-scale’ aquaculture contributed less than 30% of
farmed fish production in these countries (Phillips et al., 2016).

The missing middle segment of fish producers represented in all of the
cases above differs markedly from the idealized small farms portrayed in
developmentalist narratives. Although large numbers of households in
South and Southeast Asia have benefited from enhanced nutrition and
supplementary incomes generated by small farms of the traditional type,
these can no longer be considered the dominant mode of production. For
instance, even in Bangladesh, a country with more than 4 million small
‘homestead ponds’, two thirds of farmed fish output in 2010 originated
from fully commercial farms (Belton and Azad, 2012). Moreover, even

among the homestead pond farm segment the trend is one of intensifica-
tion and commercialization, with 38% of farms in Bangladesh using pel-
leted feeds in 2014 (Hernandez et al, 2017).

Attempts to establish small-scale aquaculture in the traditional mold
have largely failed outside of Asia. For example, concerted efforts by
external development agencies in Malawi over several decades have
been highly constrained by poor market development and, ultimately,
the limited purchasing power of a still largely rural population
(Brummett, 2000; Brummett et al., 2008). Even where well-intentioned
projects have demonstrated potential for subsistence orientated small-
scale production (e.g. Dey et al., 2010), outcomes have rarely been
sufficiently attractive to stimulate widespread uptake. Similar failures
to establish viable, self-sustaining small-scale aquaculture have been
repeated throughout a succession of African and Caribbean states
(Leschen and Little, 2014). The potential of integrated rice-fish farming,
promoted widely as a contributor to local food security, has also been
overstated. Less than 1% of the world’s rice fields are deliberately
stocked with fish, principally because returns to labor are often un-
attractive to farm households (Edwards, 2015).

As Brummett et al. (2008) outline for Africa, the types of aqua-
culture that have become most successfully established and produce the
greatest volumes of fish for domestic consumers have rarely received
direct support from government or donors because they are not per-
ceived to represent the poor, nor offer the possibility of generating
export earnings. Despite this, ‘immanent development’ (Belton and
Little, 2011) of fish farms – the unplanned supply response of large
numbers of producers and supporting value chain actors to emergent
opportunities presented by rising domestic incomes and diet transfor-
mation – is the global norm. Normative prescriptions for small-scale
aquaculture ‘planning’ that continue to pervade the literature (e.g.
Golden et al., 2016) are thus outdated and unlikely to be effective
where implemented.

Aquaculture was once widely considered to have failed in Sub-
Saharan Africa (SSA), but is now expanding rapidly in Nigeria, Uganda,
Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa. Between 2004 and 2014 there
was a seven-fold increase in farmed fish production in SSA, con-
centrated mainly in these countries, with an average annual growth rate
of 21% (Satia, 2017). The growth of aquaculture in this region parallels
the recent emergence of a substantial middle class and their demand for
more diverse diets (Tschirley et al., 2015).

Fish production serving this market was pioneered mainly by large
vertically integrated farms, but the value chain infrastructure estab-
lished to facilitate these operations (e.g. hatcheries, feed mills, cold
storage) has allowed significant numbers of medium scale producers to
emerge in some locations (see Kassam and Dorward, 2017). Poorly
developed supply chains and logistics, and consequent difficulties in
accessing inputs and end markets, remain a challenge in other areas of
SSA (Naylor, 2016). However, where these hurdles have been over-
come, the high value urban market segments targeted by large farms
are starting to become saturated, leading to some diversification into
production and marketing of smaller, cheaper fish that are accessible to
consumers in lower income brackets (see Kassam and Dorward, 2017
and Kominsky et al., In press for examples from Ghana and Zambia,
respectively). There is also a small but growing role for aquaculture
exports from Southern nations to SSA, which is now ranked as China’s
second most valuable tilapia market after the U.S. (Mao, 2016).

As noted above, one of the overriding trends in aquaculture for the
past two decades has been a shift toward more intensive forms of
production that utilize formulated pelleted feed diets to achieve higher
levels of productivity per unit area of land. Although many extensive
and semi-intensive production technologies are likley to remain viable
over the medium to long term, there is no reason to expect that the
dominant trend will reverse in favor of widespread expansion of the less
intensive production systems advocated in the interventionist literature
(e.g. Golden et al., 2016; Thilsted et al., 2016).

Moving beyond interventionist approaches opens up food security

B. Belton et al. Global Food Security 16 (2018) 85–92
90

questions that are more relevant in the context of the intensification
occurring with the rise of aquaculture’s ‘missing middle’. Perhaps most
important is the long running controversy over whether utilization of
marine ‘forage fish’ in pelleted feeds diverts food that might otherwise
be used for direct human consumption away from poorer consumers,
thereby compromising their nutrition security (e.g. Tacon and Metian,
2013). The extent to which use of fish for animal feeds competes di-
rectly with the use of fish for human consumption remains unclear,
however (Béné et al., 2015b).

Moreover, advances in the formulation of pelleted feeds mean that
feed conversion ratios (an indicator of overall feed use efficiency), and
fish-in fish-out ratios (a measure of the efficiency with which fish meal
and fish oil are utilized) are improving (e.g. Sarker et al., 2013).
Aquaculture is increasingly less dependent on marine ingredients in
feeds, with rapid substitution for vegetable derived feed ingredients
occurring (Roberts et al., 2015). Furthermore, an estimated 35% of all
marine ingredients used in feeds are now sourced from fish processing
byproducts, and aquaculture is itself becoming a major source of fish-
meal and oil (Little et al., 2016). Partly as a result of these changes, the
share of global fish production used as fishmeal declined from an
average of 23% in the 1990s to 10% in 2012; a reduction of 10 million
tonnes (HLPE, 2014).

Finally, considering the sustainability of the global food system as
whole, evidence suggests that the environmental performance of in-
tensive aquaculture, as measured by life cycle assessment, can be equal
to or better than other animal source foods (Béné et al., 2015b). The
question then, is how to build further efficiencies into aquaculture
production by working with the missing middle.

5. Conclusion

The rapid rise of aquaculture has focussed attention on the sector’s
potential to contribute to food security, as well as its perceived failures
to do so. As demonstrated here, most science and policy in this sphere
lags far behind current empirical realities and fails to recognize the
scale and nature of contributions that aquaculture already makes to
global food security. In fact, aquaculture development in the main fish
farming countries of the Global South has already averted severe de-
clines in food and nutrition security.

Part of the disconnect between narrative and reality stems from an
excessive focus in the literature on the international seafood trade, and
on farmed aquatic commodities produced for export. Export focused
research has directed attention toward a relatively small and unusually
problematic set of technologies and commodities, and away from a
domestic demand led ‘quiet revolution’ in farmed fish production, in
which huge improvements in the availability, accessibility, and stability
of fish supply have been achieved.

Instead of emphasizing aquacultural reform based on outdated
narratives about the planned development of extensive small-scale
aquaculture, we argue for recognition that diverse and increasingly
intensive forms of commercial fish farming already make important
contributions to the diets of low and middle income urban and rural
consumers in Southern countries home to more than half the world’s
population. These latter forms of farming have the greatest potential to
augment nutrient supplies from capture fisheries, and will continue to
do so, whether or not much-needed improvements in capture fisheries
governance and management are achieved. The transformation of fish
supply, already far advanced in Asia, is now also beginning to emerge in
nascent form in several of the more populous and rapidly growing
countries in Africa.

Conflicts of interest

None.

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• Not just for the wealthy: Rethinking farmed fish consumption in the Global South

Introduction
International trade vs. domestic consumption
New geographies of consumption
Access and availability
Urbanization and shifting patterns of demand
Price stability
Transforming farmed fish supply
Polarized production narratives
The missing middle
Conclusion
Conflicts of interest
References