Capital Penetration and the Subordination of the Peasantry Under Neoliberalism in Africa

As a dominant trajectory animating global capitalism, neoliberalism affects, in multiple ways, land and agriculture across the African continent, including the lives of the peasantry. Though its effects are uneven and differentiated, it generally tends to marginalise the peasantry further or incorporates them into the global political economy in a subordinate manner while also generating new rural inequalities. In large part, this is because neoliberalism (as a class project) facilitates and entrenches capital penetration into the agrarian economies of African nations. In focusing on the land and agricultural sector in primarily southern and eastern Africa, this chapter examines key dimensions of the neoliberal project in the land and agricultural sector in primarily southern and eastern Africa as the means for framing the following case study (or nation-based) chapters in this volume. This includes discussions around a reconfigured land reform programme, a new wave of land dispossession called ‘land grabs’, and restructured agricultural and marketing arrangements such as contract farming, all of which have ongoing implications for levels of food security and poverty amongst the peasantry. However, the chapter also shows that capital penetration and the subordination of the peasantry under neoliberalism in Africa is prone to crisis and resistance.