Social Stratification and Exchange in West African Conditions: A Participatory Approach to the Classification of Producers and Net Consumers of Marketed Surplus

Indian empirical research on the marketed surplus has revealed significant differences in supply response, and in the quantity, timing, intermediary, physical site, and contractual forms of crop transactions according to agrarian class positions (see Sarkar, 1981, for North India; Nadkarni, 1980, for Central India; Bohle, 1985; Harriss et al., 1984 for South India). In the absence of any systematic data, the investigation of these properties of exchange in most African countries requires original field surveys. Furthermore, schemas of class based on, say, Indian conditions of land ownership, or labour relations and/or surplus appropriation, are not relevant to many African conditions, where land frontiers have not been reached, land ownership is rarely privatised and the division of labour in agricultural production and marketplace trade is primarily structured by gender (Meillassoux, 1981; Robson, Chapter 13 in this volume). A farmer may be male or female. Even where, as here, a farm household head is invariably male, the household may contain more than one farmer. Even a differentiating criterion such as ‘wealth’ is not a simple function of farm size. Rather, it is a conglomerate of several criteria. To discover a set of locally relevant wealth criteria prior to a socially disaggregated study of the marketed surplus and exchange relations, a participatory approach was used experimentally. In the account that follows, experience from fourteen villages of Atlantic Province, Benin is described.