Recent scholarship has given rice farming communities of the Upper Guinea Coast a strong relevance in African and African-American studies. This panel aims at comparing these coastal farming settings and the problems they are confronted with. Scholars who claim that this is a ‘culture area’ often stress similarities while ignoring significant differences. We would like to keep the underlying similarities, but also to highlight the particularities of each setting. Papers could address the following topics: Ethnicity and political incorporation: Scholars who stress the similarities between different coastal settings often ignore how different they are in their colonial and post-colonial histories and how these histories shape current livelihoods and predicaments; Religious culture: There is a well-documented connexion between regional cults, rice farming and social identity; it would be interesting to explore how these cults interplay with processes of political incorporation, with universal religious discourses, with the violence of the region, etc.; Effects of violence: Wars and civil upheaval have affected some important rice farming communities along the region; we are interested in examining how these conflicts affect the bases of social production and reproduction; Rice and the memory of slavery: Scholarship on the slave trade and on its legacies has illuminated the history of the region; internal structures of domination, however, have by and large remained under-explored; Indigenous knowledge systems and external intervention: Colonial and post-colonial interventions have mainly adopted a production-oriented approach, bypassing endogenous processes of experimentation and selection of innovation; important work (notably by P. Richards) has been produced on the impact of external intervention upon indigenous knowledge systems; it would be most fruitful to further develop this line of research along the continuum of the coastal societies; Gender and rice farming: Women’s agency in rice farming has experienced both systematic neglect and over-emphasis; we still need more comparative work on the diversity of roles that women play in livelihood strategies in different coastal societies and on the current trends of change in these roles.
In the late 15th Century, Portuguese explorers put in evidence the strong identity of Upper Guinea coast societies, based on rice farming system and mangrove reclamation into remarkable landscape. From colonial penetration to nowadays, this system has been deeply re-assessed, to such an extent that rice cultivation is no more the sole and prior livelihood, mangrove uses and access rights are contested, and local communities are shaken by inner contradictions and pressures from outside. Through an approach of historical geography and political ecology, this paper will underline the changes in appreciation and policy concerning Upper Guinea Coast and address the questions of local heritage.
The paper will address whether men and women deal with genetic diversity in different ways, and if so, what are the reasons. What are the socio-economic factors because of which men and women deal with genetic diversity in different ways? The paper will be based on a comparison of men and women dealing genetic diversity in both crops.
Rice can travel a long way and through the experimental knowledge of farmers it can adapt and thrive in places far away from where it came from. Southern Guinea-Bissau can be considered a reservoir of both rice genetic diversity and farmers’ germplasm management skills, and it could easily provide support to neighbouring communities such as Sierra Leone and Liberia (from where several indigenous or ‘indigenized’ rice varieties were formerly obtained), where war has all but destructed local varieties’ stocks. Southern Guinea-Bissau strategies of rice germplam management and multiple criteria for variety selection have been challenging external interventions whose primary aim, ever since Independence (1975), has been to replace local varieties by a reduced number of ‘improved’ ones. However, external agents showed a kind of ‘autism’ in relation to farmers’ total rejection (or adoption in small quantities) of the majority of these varieties, and because of recent upheavals in the country and a succession of poor yields, this genetic and skills diversity is now threatened.
Funded by the Japanese, the West African Rice Development Association has recently developed a series of hybrids between Asian and African Rice. These new NERICA rices are said to be a boon to low-resource rainfed rice farmers throughout Africa. The paper explores why researchers have a preference for improving Asian Rice with a donation of genes from African Rice, whereas food-insecure farmers in West African war zones seek out and restore the old African Rices. Whose approach to food security makes most sense? Can plant improvement be defined independently of a context for use?
The Bulongic are a small group of some 6,000 rice farmers living on coastal Guinée and known for their sophisticated techniques of rice farming in mangrove swamps. In 1997, claiming that the traditional methods were not profitable enough, Guinean President Lansana Conté decided to sell the land to a Malaysian agricultural company, the Société Bernas de Guinée (SOBERGUI). In this paper, I describe the crisis created by the introduction of the SOBERGUI, and how the current dire situation is perceived by Bulongic themselves.