Hanging by a Thread: Cotton, Globalization, and Poverty in Africa (review)

The human appreciation of cotton, as a source of fiber for textile production, has a long and complex globe-spanning history. Cotton has been implicated in the acceleration and intensification of global relationships of trade, domination, and inequality since the seventeenth century or before. The Atlantic slave trade, the appropriation of arable land in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, coupled with forced cultivation in Europe's colonies, are but a few of the disturbing consequences of the politics of ensuring, at all costs, a supply of raw material to textile manufacturers. Today, cotton remains an important commodity as it circulates through global textile markets and decorates homes and bodies throughout the world.

The title of this multidisciplinary volume, Hanging By a Thread: Cotton, Globalization, and Poverty in Africa, is all the proof we need that the "cotton problem" has not gone away. According to the editors, the purpose of this book is to offer an updated analysis of the cotton industry in the postcolonial period as a complement to historically focused texts, notably the 1995 volume titled Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts.

Hanging by a Thread consists of nine chapters grouped in three parts, and an introduction and a conclusion written by the editors. Key arguments, made by several authors, are the focus of this review. This volume contains pertinent information for anyone interested in the production of cotton in Africa. Summarizing the main themes treated in the volume, the editors claim that cotton institutions in many African countries have failed to generate benefits for farmers, who suffer an economic "squeeze" when prices fall and debts cannot be repaid. Perhaps inadvertently, Gray and Moseley have channeled Henry Bernstein, who in his 1977 publication, "Notes on Capital and Peasantry," was extremely critical of the role of commodity relations in producing a cycle of indebtedness in Africa, forcefully stating that the "simple reproduction squeeze" is in fact a mechanism "to maintain or increase the supply of commodities without capital incurring any costs of management and supervision of the production process" (p. 65). Supporting Bernstein's assertions are Bassett, Gray, Koenig, Lacy, and Moseley, all of whom suggest that indebtedness remains profoundly problematic for most farmers (pp. 57, 73-75, 190, 213, and 274, respectively).

The topic of debt is thoroughly examined, but the central concepts of globalization and poverty, emphasized in the title of this volume, are mostly left unexplored. This is a serious omission, particularly with regard to relatively long-standing academic debates concerning the nature of global processes and the production of poverty. The lack of analysis of shifting global patterns of consumption implicitly places responsibility for the problems of commodity production on the producers themselves, rather than the consumers. The obvious and implicit linkage between Africans and impoverishment reifies the trope of crisis in Africa while mystifying the social causes of poverty. Siaens and Wodon demonstrate this tendency by failing to provide a nuanced explanation of their concept of poverty, their measurement of the phenomenon, or the subjective experience of so-called poor farmers (pp.164-166). In some chapters, the unexamined usage of several other theoretically problematic concepts (e.g. development, sustainability) reveals an implicit analytical framework, derived from the discourse of development itself. Readers deserve a fuller explanation of the contradictory vocabularies of academia and industry interwoven throughout this volume.

Two chapters are notable for providing more nuanced analyses of the impact of the global cotton industry in Africa. Thomas Bassett employs a global commodity-chain approach in his treatment of world cotton prices, revealing the highly unequal power relationships that shape the incomes of African cotton farmers. He draws our attention to the harmful implications of intensive use of agrochemical inputs in cotton production in West Africa, and suggests that the global commodity chain linking farmers to the transnational corporations that supply seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides merits close scrutiny (pp. 42...