Democracy and Development in Mali

Prospects for Development and Democracy in West Africa: Agrarian Politics in Mali

Prospects for Development and Democracy in West Africa: Agrarian Politics in Mali R. JAMES BINGEN Introduction I n the course of an exploratory research activity in southern Mali during 1992, I witnessed an especially heated confrontation between an older farmer and a representative from one of the country's parastatal crop production agencies. The farmer was one of the local leaders for the new union of cotton farmers, the Malian Union of Cotton and Food Crop Producers (SYCOV).I Over the next three years, I had the opportunity to learn more and write about this union and its role in agricultural policy making and research.2 Most of this work focused on the relationship between key organizational features and SYCOV's effectiveness in agricultural policy and program implementation .3 Internal administrative and management issues continue to loom large for SYCOV and are being addressed, in part, through a long-term program of organizational development with CIRAD.4 The political issues confronting Malian cotton farmers can be assessed in terms of two closely related themes: (1) the international political economy of cotton, and (2) the emergence of, and relationships, between various Malian agricultural and rural interest groups. A recently published article begins to address this first topic by examining international corporate and public capital and the process of democratization and development in Mali.5 This chapter focuses on the second theme and explores how an understanding of the politics of agricultural interest groups in Mali might contribute to the study of democratization and development in sub-Saharan Africa. These groups remain absent from international press reports that tend to concentrate on the more readily observable contributions of a lively press and vibrant multiparty politics to democratization in Mali.6 This discovery of the 349 350 R. JAMES BINGEN Malian democratic experiment under the Third Republic may signal a place for Mali on the still-emerging global strategic, economic, and political agendas of the post-Cold War era. Malian agricultural and rural interests may never play much of a publicly recognized role on these agendas, but they will be key actors in Malian development and deserve our critical attention. Historical Overview Historical reviews of Malian politics give little notice to the role of agricultural interest groups and unions in the colonial politics ofthe Soudan? Archival references , however, help us to identify three historically important policy continuities since the colonial era that help improve our understanding of contemporary agricultural interest groups in Mali. These include governmental preference to protect commodity processing and marketing interests over producer interests, a governmental-corporate understanding concerning the 'division of investments' in agriculture, and a governmental interest in promoting agricultural groups as the means for carrying out rural development programs. Colonial cotton politics A brief and incompletely documented exchange of correspondence among some French settlers in Kayes, colonial administrators, and the Deputy for the Soudan and Upper Volta offers some evidence of the colonial government's preference to protect processing and marketing interests over those of either French settler or African producers. Shortly after the end of World War I, a small group of French agriculturalists formed the first agricultural union, the Syndicat des Agriculteurs du Soudan Franrais, in order to lobby for a subsidy to grow cotton in the region around the town of Kayes. Their appeal, launched perhaps in the hope that France's continuing 'cotton crisis' might reverse the colonial government's bias against settler agriculture, was unsuccessful.8 The governor-general argued that governmental support for cotton production would only favor a small number of European producers and that the government 's priorities instead should be in infrastructure development and the "vulgarisation de nos methodes agricoles chez les indigenes. " This decision reinforced a related policy preference for a system of direct subsidies to the French textile industry for processing and marketing through the Colonial Cotton Association (Association Cotonniere ColoniaIe and what would eventually become the CFDT [Compagnie Francaise pour Ie Developpement AGRARIAN POLITICS IN MALI 351 des Fibres Textiles]) plus the corvee on peasant farmers to produce cotton for the textile finns.9 In other words, the request from the Kayes Syndicat directly contradicted colonial policy to subsidize the textile industry and to invest in agricultural research for the development of new cotton varieties that would be more attractive on the European market. Finally, undaunted by the immense problems raised by the governmentimposed Indigenous Provident Societies, colonial administrators in the Soudan were...