The socio-political impact of commodity production in a marginal subsistence rural economy: A case study of cotton in Evurori location of Embu district

Abstract

The impact of the penetration of capital into the countryside through the introduction of cash-crops is a controversial area in Political Economy and related fields of study. Such penetration has brought the small producers (the peasantry) into direct relations with capital. During the colonial times, large-scale production of such cash-crops as coffee, tea, pyrethrum, wattle and so on for foreign markets, brought, about massive land alienation, especially in the hi;h-potential areas of the country. It subsequently meant a reduction of the Africans into wage labourers on the settler farms. The results of this have been both positive and negative, hence the controversy among scholars. Since the first half of this century, numerous studies have been carried out in various parts of Kenya to investigate this phenomenon. In this endeavour, much attention has been focused on the peasants, who are the main (and in some cases the sole) producers of these agricultural commodities. The findings have been as varied as the studies themselves and it is this variance that 5ave birth to the famous debate on the Kenyan peasantry. However, it is our view that the main cause of the debate has been the employment by the various scholars in this field)of various theoretical approaches to explain the Kenyan situation. Peasant encounter with capital has occurred not only in the high-potential areas but also in the less productive ones, popularly referred to as marginal areas. In both cases, the peasants have found themselves occupying a precarious position where, by producing both for consumption and for cash, they are caught up in between two competing economies: a subsistence economy on one hand, and the modern capitalist economy, on the other. This study therefore, which is based on one of the marginal areas of eastern Embu District, seeks to examine the systematic incorporation of this area into capitalist production through the cultivation of cotton. Taking a historical perspective, the study begins with the year 1965 and traces the development of cotton production for a period of two decades and the impact of this process from the social and political perspectives. Based mainly on survey research, the study takes as its unit of analysis an administrative Iocation namely, Evurori. It is here that one encounters the Mbeere peasants who have for a long time now relied on among other things, livestock raising, bee-keeping and shifting cultivation. The introduction of cotton as a cash crop in Evurori in 1965 therefore, occasioned a general shift in emphasis, from subsistence fanning to production for the market and also a diversification of the sources of income. A striking thing however, is the persistence of precapitalist forms and tools of production, labour processes and social formations alongside capitalist forms of production. The peasants here seem to own the means of production, chiefly land and labour. In this regard and bearing in mind the theories of the "differentiation" and "dissolution" of the peasantry and also the Kenyan "debate", some of the questions this study attempts to answer are: has the Mbeere peasant between "impoverished", "ruined" by capital, by being divorced from the means of production as used by some theorists? Has he been transformed into a wage-Iabourer? Has cotton production produced a socially stratified society? And finally, in what way(s) (if any), has capital affected the politics of the area? In view of the development strategies being adopted by the government, especially in respect of the arid and semi arid areas of the country, the study ends by citing some of the salient problems experienced by the peasant farmers in these drought and famine-prone places. It then attempts to offer a few workable solutions which policy-makers or other interested parties could do well to think over, especially in light of the fact that cotton appears to be not only the present, but also the future cash crop of the marginal areas.