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Rwanda: an agrarian developmental state?

Graham Harrison

To cite this article: Graham Harrison (2016) Rwanda: an agrarian developmental state?, Third World Quarterly, 37:2, 354-370, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1058147

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058147

Published online: 20 Nov 2015.

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Rwanda: an agrarian developmental state?

Graham Harrison

Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK

Introduction This article explores Rwanda’s agricultural policy within the context of the agrarian question. That is, it looks at Rwanda’s specific situation and the contours of its agricultural change and policy initiatives as a way to analyse how the Government of Rwanda (GoR) and other aligned agencies are responding to an ‘insistent’ question in countries with large agricultural sectors: how to manage the multiple forces that expand and deepen capitalist social relations in agriculture so that social change is tolerably stable and maximally socially beneficial? This particular framing to analyse Rwanda’s agricultural dynamics has the merit of moving away from commonly one-sided and sometimes polemic analyses of Rwanda’s development, because it situates policy, intervention and peasant agency within a political economy beset by political difficulties and material hardships of a high order. Without this context – and a historically informed evaluation of policy reactions to it – one is likely to miss the distinctive aspects of Rwanda’s agricultural transition, downplay the straitened room for manoeuvre for any Rwandan government, and to move rather too quickly over the substantial achieve- ments of the government to date. None of this, however, is to make a totalising celebration of Rwanda’s agricultural strategy, and far less to make claims of an inexorable forward march towards prosperity in the countryside.

ABSTRACT This article investigates Rwanda’s agricultural policies and institutions as a historically contextualised response to exceptionally adverse developmental circumstances. Using the agrarian question as an analytical point of reference, the article argues that it is extremely difficult to identify how increases in productivity and income in smallholder agriculture can be achieved without forceful state action and a sustained injection of resources. In light of this, entirely right- congruent governance is caught in a dilemma about the extent to which the government overrides peasants’ own agency and the extent to which the agrarian strategy produces a sustained and stable transformation in agriculture. Rather than making a defence or condemnation of the government’s strategy, the article argues against pre-emptive judgements of an agrarian strategy that can only discernibly attain success over a long period. What the article does do is insist that there is development potential in the current strategy, not simply a disaster in the making.

© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com

KEYWORDS Rwanda agrarian question developmental state governance

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 February 2015 Accepted 1 June 2015

CONTACT Graham Harrison [email protected]

THiRD WoRlD QUARTeRly, 2016 Vol. 37, No. 02, 354–370 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058147

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The article introduces the agrarian question as a conceptual framework before situating the framework in a Rwandan context. It then maps out Rwanda’s agricultural strategy not only as a set of policies and objectives but also (in keeping with the focus offered through the agrarian question) as a state-based development project. Through a detailing of agrarian strategy within an agrarian-question frame of reference, we argue that Rwanda is in a situ- ation in which imperfect progress has been achieved. The article concludes by considering what this means for ongoing assessments of Rwanda’s agricultural development, which is, of course, in its early stages.

The agrarian question: the political economy of constraint

In its broadest formulation the agrarian question is: how to manage capitalist transition in agriculture? deriving from a Marxist theoretical background, the agrarian question is about the political economy of capitalist social relations in peasant societies. The agrarian question offers a ‘rigorous but flexible analytical framework to explore the processes that contribute to or constrain the emergence of agrarian capital and rural capitalism’.1 empirically and the- oretically the ‘question’ (rarely asked as single simple question but more as a thematic2) has concerned itself with the dynamic persistence of peasant livelihoods as countries undergo capitalist development. In concrete instances many social processes are involved: the rise of commercial farming, the concentration of land, the imposition of privatised land tenure sys- tems, dispossession of peasants, the expansion of state regulation of peasant production and exchange, processes of social differentiation within peasant societies, the intensification of commoditisation within peasant households as people produce increasing amounts for mar- ket exchange, the growth of wage labour as part of the peasant household’s reproduction, the introduction of contract farming, and the expansion of capital into agricultural ‘chains’ supplying credit and technologies. In empirical instances these process might combine and may or may not involve actual dispossession of land. I may well have missed something out, but the point is illustrative: that agricultural societies are not historic residuals in the onward march of urban-industrial capitalism but are at the heart of capitalist development, manifesting a diverse set of historical processes that are not well summarised as ‘the death of the peasantry’. at the heart of this diversity is a core driver: the combined and uneven development of capitalist social relations.

The agrarian question offers a uniquely insightful way to analyse actions of states and other agencies in their attempts to transform agriculture. analytically we are drawn towards political economy: the distribution and contestation of authority over resources, labour and market power. epistemologically not only do we assume that agriculture can be as ‘mod- ern’ and dynamic as any other economic sector, we also recognise that agrarian transitions are determinedly troublesome transitions. Intensifying work, the appropriation of property and surplus, the establishing of new forms (and norms) of accumulation, the expansion of state power and so on do not generate the kind of freedom-enhancing positive-sum and incentive-rich social changes that liberal and ‘grassroots’ theories of development might suggest. Nor do they allow policy makers, consultants and donors to recommend policies and programmes ex cathedra as if the minds of experts can create linear, perfected and ordered agricultural development on the ground. In a phrase: the agrarian question is a troubled one, issuing in a politics of constraint, contingency and always (much to the chagrin of liberals) the politically devised allocation of hardship.

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It makes a considerable difference to talk of capitalist development rather than simply development. ‘development’ is used in a phenomenal way – to discuss objectives and meas- ure outcomes – and it is often based in some notion of an ordered, inclusive and socially beneficial process. This is normatively attractive and it enables a great raft of global initiatives, donor programmes, consultancies and government ‘visions’ of one kind or another. ‘Capitalist development’ is a conceptualisation that is not irretrievably dour, but it does recognise that agrarian change tends towards instability, involves social hardship for some and perhaps many, and is not easily controlled by the state or any other single agency.

Closely related to this ‘capitalist’ sensibility is the ‘melancholic’ or ‘tragic’ approach to development and conflict.3 ‘Tragic’ here is a stylisation of a historical methodology in which progress is an outcome of both processes of growth, increased productivity and some gen- eralised improvement in social well-being, and dispossession and exploitation. This ‘double helix’ of economic progress and social hardship (to adapt from an important and related argument4) unfolds in myriad and multi-scalar ways within historically realised processes of capitalist accumulation. To exclude this constitutive facet of capitalism is to miss almost everything that is important: the dynamism, flexibility and exploitative nature of actually existing development.

a cursory review of discussions about the agrarian question readily reveals analogous sensibilities to the melancholic nature of agrarian change.5 But, it should be emphasised as a final point, none of this is to assert a necessitarian historical method in which nasty things ‘have to happen’ in order to produce development outcomes. This kind of consequentialism is normatively troubling. In fact, the agrarian question as sketched here both understands ‘pain and progress’ as intertwined and interactive (hence the dNa figurative) and it is a ques- tion not an answer. It is a way to frame realistic assessments of policy, state action, struggle, resistance and the contestation of ideas. The agrarian question is a political question set in a robust political economy.

The agrarian question in Rwanda

Historical context

Rwanda’s agrarian question can reasonably be characterised as an exceptionally difficult one. This section sketches Rwanda’s agrarian history to illustrate the specific historical legacies and constraints that shape the present day.

The beginnings of the modern state of Rwanda in the late 19th century derived from the expansion of the Rwandan monarchy, the consolidation of a system of rural authority over land and labour, and a class system based in ownership of cattle, claims on labour and clientship.6 These processes were characterised by resistance, political manoeuvre, migra- tions and conflict within a social landscape that was not primordially homogenous or inte- grated into the Rwandan state.7 The Belgian colonial state introduced ‘ossified’ and tribalised versions of rural authority through chieftaincy that was increasingly associated with Tutsi social identity.8 This colonial–monarchical system imposed regimes of unpaid work and taxes throughout Rwanda’s countryside. In rural areas and in manifold ways peasants experienced colonialism as the loss of flexibility and accountability in the decentralised clientage that had previously defined land and livestock, and was a more concerted conquest of the state in what previously was a rather variegated set of alliances with the King. Throughout this

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period there were constant migrations in order to escape monarchical power and colonial state exactions, or to modify political allegiances.9

on the eve of independence (1959–64), Rwanda’s political parties and related organisa- tions struggled for access to state power, exacerbated by the manoeuvrings of the Belgian colonial administrators and leading to violence and a migration of thousands from the countryside mainly into what is now called the democratic Republic of Congo (dRC).10 other out-migrations followed after independence in 1962, largely of Tutsi as a result of sporadic violence connected to President Gregoire Kayibanda’s ideology, which conflated social democracy with Hutu empowerment.11 There followed a period of relative calm and some stability from 1973, when Juvenal Habyarimana took power through a military coup, implementing an authoritarian and populist programme based in an ideology that affirmed an image of Hutu ‘peasantness’.

From the late 1970s to the late 1980s the Habyarimana regime set out a programme of agricultural change based on four components: a conflation (more or less explicit) of the Rwandan peasantry with the virtuous Hutu (akin to the english romantic trope of a yeoman farmer),12 the working up of good relations with donors and the profusion of projects,13 an emphasis on the intensification of rural labour combined with an extension of land under cropping,14 and a prioritisation of food security based on sustained increases in food crop production.

at the heart of this ethnic agrarian populism was ‘the project’: state-aligned and often donor-funded attempts to reorganise peasants’ livelihoods.15 This was also the period within which both government and donors became seized of the developmental issues posed by high population densities on the land and a high rate of population growth, both of which were concerns effectively associated with agriculture and the Malthusian concepts of car- rying capacity, population pressure and famine.

during the late 1980s economic slowdown and a damaging structural adjustment pro- gramme were accompanied by Habyarimana’s refusal to address the question of return for over a hundred thousand Rwandan diaspora in neighbouring countries.16 Between 1985 and 1992 the international price of the two major peasant cash crops – coffee and tea – fell by 75% and 66%, respectively.17 The Habyarimana government became increasingly authori- tarian and explicit in deploying a discourse of ethnicity akin to what lonsdale calls ‘political tribalism’.18 during this period attacks on Tutsi (re)commenced. In 1990 the Rwanda Patriotic Front entered Rwanda over the Ugandan border, commencing a civil war that led to more mass migrations and livelihood disruption.

In 1994, over a period of 100 days, the remnants of the incumbent government and the militias that it had been training for two years rolled out a genocide against the Tutsi population after Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. during the genocide and civil war, tens of thousands of Hutus were also killed and perhaps as many as a million people fled the country. There were also large movements of people – over one million – within the country, leaving a profoundly uprooted and traumatised rural society by the time the RPF had established full control.

during the genocide militias also redistributed assets within agrarian society, justify- ing the killing of Tutsi in terms of their (supposed) material wealth and their (supposed) non-indigeneity.19 There was also destruction of rural property and infrastructure, and what agribusiness remained and survived stopped production and became decrepit. The constant labour needed to maintain waterways and terraces on the hills also ceased. detailed research

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on the genocide’s spread throughout Rwanda’s rural areas reveals complex socio-political dynamics that are not easily rendered into a mono-causal or simple explanation.20 But there is a facet of the genocide which combined a darkly ironic repetition of the constant entreaty to ‘work’ (now referring to killing Tutsi people in the villages, fields and marshes) and a sense of nihilism in which one had to obey the instructions to kill relentlessly or face death at the hands of the Interahamwe or (supposedly) the advancing RPF.21 Perhaps the most striking example of this agrarian destructivism was the mass import of machetes as weapons rather than tools.22 The dynamics of the genocide also interacted with struggles over land and the emergence of large landowners in the context of increasing land scarcity.23

This brief historical sketch illustrates the key features of Rwanda’s agrarian question up to 1994. In the first place, extreme flux and instability, manifested particularly in a series of large-scale coerced migrations. In the second place, the underlying issue of increasing pressure on the land. In the third place a series of (donor-funded) state projects to expand control over peasant societies and to intervene in the livelihoods of peasants in more intru- sive and detailed fashion. and, in the fourth place, the genocide, which has left a political but often covert legacy of anxiety about agrarian change and the possibilities of mass violence in the future. If the context for most african states when facing the strategic and political issues concerning how to manage agrarian transitions is challenging, it seems fair to say that Rwanda’s particular situation in 1994 was the envy of no-one. How did the RPF-dominated government respond in this especially austere context?

Rwanda’s agrarian strategy

It is commonplace to divide Rwanda’s post-genocide history into phases. Having acknowl- edged the caveat that these phases are useful interpretively but of course blend and overlap when looking at detailed realities, we will follow them here. The period from 1994 to 1999 is seen as one in which high-order issues of political order and sovereignty were paramount; the second period (2000–06/7) is seen as one of establishing the conditions for economic growth that involved increasing levels of donor development support and a conformity to donor orthodoxy; the third period commenced in 2007/8 and has been characterised as issuing in a ‘development vision’ coded into the meta-programme of Vision 2020 and the second economic development and Poverty Reduction Strategy.24

The first phase was characterised by two major and closely interrelated endeavours: ensuring order during resettlement and consolidating state authority throughout Rwanda’s territory. Between 800,000 and one million refugees from pre-1990s out-migrations aimed to return after the RPF came to power. additionally, 1.3–2 million refugees and internally displaced people from the civil war and genocide were moving back to their lands and residences;25 in all two-thirds of Rwanda’s people were dislocated.26 This was done through the creation of villages and a novel ‘land sharing’ arrangement that – although by no means perfect – was an effective means of dealing with a period of considerable flux in rural areas. The major emphasis during this period was the basic assurance of nutrition for a popula- tion traumatised and uprooted. This involved heavy donor funding and little in the way of strategic development thinking. The measure of considerable success during this period was the avoidance of famine.

The second phase was characterised by the consolidation of a development strategy that in many ways reflected the contours of development politics in many other african countries.

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In 2000 the war and counterinsurgency in the northwest formally ended, a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process commenced (leading to a PRSP in 2004), and the government’s Vision 2020 was launched. Rwanda appeared to have recovered from the impact of the genocide and to have ‘normalised’ into a broadly PRSP framework. Supporting this, donors increased their lending and involvement in policy making.27 all of this was underpinned by a ‘renaissance’ and growth narrative in which international donors and politicians were highly impressed with Rwanda’s recovery and growth.28

a donor-supported decentralisation was introduced in 2001 that consolidated state power in the districts and a highly consultative land reform deliberation was started. By 2004/5 the national implementation of Gacaca reconciliation courts and further decentralisation created a situation in which the government ‘presence’ in agrarian societies became authoritative and pervasive.29 at this juncture the government rolled out its first comprehensive national agri- cultural strategy, the Programme for the Strategic Transformation of agriculture 1 (PSTa1).

donor agricultural projects and the PSTa1 both aimed to support the poorest groups in rural areas and to promote increased production. The general prioritisation of government was not strongly focused on agriculture at this time: there was more of an emphasis on urban regeneration, information technology and the service industry.30 There was no agricultural sector-wide group to integrate donors into a single strategic plan. as a policy text PSTa1 focused on support for the intensified integration of smallholder agriculture into broader market relations but there was little sense of agricultural development as a transformative strategy. PSTa1 issued in only the beginnings of a comprehensive and integrated strategy. Its first phase was dedicated to constructing the institutions for a sector-wide approach. Most implementation matters were not centrally addressed. Indeed, as the PSTa1 progressed, many donors considered the programme to have been a failure and some had considered withdrawing support (author’s interviews with donors).

The third phase started in 2007, a period distinguished by a considerable ratcheting up of institutional and political impetus behind a national agrarian strategy, based in a more focused strategic objective of chain integration and ‘upgrading’. The reference to chain upgrading has become mainstreamed within Rwanda’s agricultural policy-making circles. It refers to two processes that are seen as interrelated: first, the increasing connection of smallholder farming with upstream and downstream activities such as seed and fertiliser supply and the selling of crops to processors and traders; second, efforts to improve the quantity and quality of agricultural production (the latter not having featured in PSTa1).

This was first embodied in the Crop Intensification Programme (CIP 2007). CIP introduced the major strategic decision to create macro-zones for cropping in an attempt to generate regional crop specialisms and to promote a scaling-up in agriculture. The CIP’s core objec- tive is to promote increased agricultural productivity through the application of chemical fertilisers, the use of improved seeds and the provision of extension services. CIP has been operationalised through the creation of government agencies: the Rwanda Cooperative agency (RCa, 2008), Rwanda agricultural Board (RaB, 2010) and the National agricultural export Board (NaeB, 2011). The RCa, NaeB, and RaB all supply subsidised or free inputs: fertilisers, seeds and seedlings for example. and CIP was integrated into the broader strategy of the PSTa2 in 2009, a programme that attained renewed donor support (partly on the back of changed leadership within the Ministry of agriculture), met its declared targets early and led to a PSTa3 in 2012. This triggered increased commitments from some donors (particularly the World Bank, dFId, the eU, the Belgian BTC and the dutch) and a broader governmental

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refocusing on agriculture as the source of growth and development, articulated in the second economic development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (2013). We shall say more about the specifics of this phase in the next section.

Assessing Rwanda’s agricultural strategy

The prioritisation of agriculture

We have identified a ‘Rwandan agrarian question’ in four themes: high population density on the land; high levels of migration within and out of the country; high levels of state presence in peasant societies; and the extreme and exceptional impact of the genocide. We have also sketched a post-genocide agricultural strategy that has moved through three phases to bring Rwanda into a situation in which basic concerns with order and authority have been addressed, some conformity with global agendas of development and agrarian change have been affirmed, and the beginnings of an ambitious, holistic and more ‘Rwandan’ programme have been introduced. This section will explore the nature of the third phase in more detail.

We should start by recognising the remarkable success Rwanda has achieved in terms of increased output. ‘The total production of maize, wheat and cassava tripled from 2007 to 2011, the production of beans doubled, and that of rice and Irish potato increased by 30 per cent’.31 There has also been a fall in the prevalence of poverty in rural areas and in malnutrition,32 although it is fair to say that these falls look moderate in comparison with the increase in outputs.33 and inequality remains a major problem: the Gini coefficient has improved but not at a rate that reflects the high levels of economic growth.34 There are, of course, important arguments about the political dynamics that underlie these positive figures; all sorts of hardship and poverty remain, and there is no easy to clear prognosis that Rwanda’s agrarian society will continue to develop. These kinds of issue will be dealt with in the next section. In this section it is worth noting what appear to be distinctive features in Rwanda’s agrarian strategy.

The concerted focus on agriculture from about 2007 is not insignificant. It has been under- pinned by a steady increase in the proportion of the government’s budget dedicated to agri- culture,35 rising by roughly 10% per year.36 It has been realised through considerable resource input and institutional innovation. It has also involved a substantial reorganisation of rural settlement and agricultural production. There has been a push to gather smallholders into aggregated settlements – imidugudu – although this is not a programme of villagisation in a way that one would recognise from that which took place in 1970s Mozambique, Tanzania or ethiopia.37 Production has been synchronised rather than collectivised and there has not been a large-scale movement of people into communal villages.

The RCa has registered nearly 5000 cooperatives,38 each of which has a ‘business plan’ to increase productivity, value added and integrated agricultural activities. Indeed, the coop- erative has been the basic unit for the bulk of agricultural strategic planning. The form of cooperative can vary from 20 or 30 households to thousands, and it may involve smallholders simply selling collectively, the creation of blocs of individual farming units that coordinate production, the creation of small agricultural enterprises (for example a coffee washing station or a mill), or the creation of cooperatives for workers on agricultural plantations.39 Cooperatives are created by local initiative or through government fiat. each of these kinds of cooperative receives support from the GoR.

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The GoR has developed a set of interconnected agencies that promote aspects of the PSTa3. NaeB promotes the development of higher-grade exports. This involves the provi- sion of subsidised inputs, creating branding and quality assurance, and investing in larger and higher-specification crop processing. The RaB intervenes in similar ways for a broader range of crops which are produced for food and domestic sale. The Ministry of agriculture works with these agencies and more intensively with the agricultural donor group, which funds aspects of the PSTa3 as well as national programmes such as the Rural Sector Support Programme and the land Husbandry, Water Harvesting and Hillside Irrigation Project (RSSP/ lWH).40 The Ministry of agriculture also has various specific projects funded by donors in fertiliser provision, land management and irrigation.

In addition, the Ministry of agriculture has also provided resources to support the intro- duction of new crops, irrigation techniques, terracing and chemical fertiliser. Paralleling the ‘core’ agricultural support strategy, the GoR has supported the development of Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SaCCos) and other small-scale credit facilities, as well as Girinka (again with strong donor support), a programme which provides free livestock for the poorest households as a form of basic economic security. all these initiatives are, characteristically for Rwandan governance generally, articulated within specific targets and auditing procedures under the neo-traditional rubric of imihigo.41

From growth to transformation: agricultural chains

The point here is that agricultural development is underpinned by a substantial state effort to promote increased productivity within agriculture, largely through the agency of the agricultural cooperative. This support is, furthermore, oriented towards an ambitious trans- formation within Rwanda’s agricultural areas. The transformation can be characterised as one in which peasant farmers move away from the diverse patterns of production and market integration based on the dispersed and small plots of land that pervade Rwanda’s rural spaces towards an aggregated and more specific mode of articulation, which brings us back to the ‘chain’ metaphor again.

The GoR has established a coherent and integrated strategy of chain integration and upgrading that one can identify in most policy documents, associated donor funding doc- uments, public statements, and also within interviews. The premise is that Rwanda’s agri- cultural sector is limited by severe land constraints and that therefore extensive forms of agricultural development are impossible. There are forests in the north and east but these are largely subjected to restrictions as a result of tourism and conservation. Studies also suggest that these lands would not be good for agriculture in any case. There are some drier areas in the south which are not intensively used. But, beyond these, Rwanda has reached its ‘land frontier’.42 as a result, promoting increased incomes and the value of production within agriculture can only take place through improvements in value added. The immediate way to achieve this is through the production of either higher quality, more standardised or more highly branded crops.

The GoR has made considerable efforts to promote this kind of integration and upgrading. NaeB has introduced standard setting, the promotion of certification and some branding for original-source tea and coffee. The RCa has provided support to cooperatives to establish supply contracts with ‘downstream’ agencies. The NaeB and RCa oversee contract making between cooperatives and agricultural processors and retailers, pushing for businesses to

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provide support to farmers in attaining the requisite levels of quality and quantity. The seed and fertiliser programmes have been implemented through a strong extension project in which extension officers (agronomes) work in villages, cooperatives are supported in cre- ating demonstration fields and ‘farmer fields’ (which attempt to roll out changes in crop practices), and district government – through various devices such as imihigo performance contracts and the management of centrally disbursed resources – promotes investment and innovations within cooperatives.

The Government also exercises political influence on processors and purchasers to pro- vide cheap credit, seeds and other forms of support to the farmers it contracts to buy from. Interviews with private sector organisations engaged in contracting with cooperatives por- trayed the government’s political stance as primarily motivated to increase the incidence of contract farming but also supportive of the cooperatives within this context. Interviewees in all the major government agencies involved in agriculture mentioned unsolicited an aware- ness that contracting and upgrading represented real risks for farmers and that it was the government’s role to minimise these. The underlying rationale behind the various forms of support in regard to fertiliser provision is derived from a concern that fertilisers remain predictably affordable for cooperatives.43 The RCa also stipulates that cooperatives receive a share of the capital of processing facilities that the government has been involved in either through rehabilitation or privatisation. Government agencies (the RCa or the Rwanda development Board) ‘witness’ and advise on contract-making between cooperatives and private businesses with a remit to ensure that the contracts are reasonable in terms of expec- tations from cooperatives. In interviews agricultural officials spoke about failed contracts (as a result of insufficient quantities supplied or quality/standardisation shortfalls) as a concern for processors and government in improving cooperative performance, not simply as an agricultural supply failure.

Chain integration and upgrading are operationalised through cooperatives with the explicit aims of both increasing the entrepreneurial identities of peasants and improving their material well-being. The Rwandan government’s response to its agrarian question is a muscular and ambitious transformation of agrarian society into a diversity of production units formally named as cooperatives and integrated through contracts with businesses upstream and downstream of the farm.

It is important to note at this point the high levels of state presence in this transformational project. The Rwandan government has both projected its power into rural societies to a high degree and has established through laws,44 imihigo and extension services a top-down reor- dering of people’s lives. The pervasive institutionalised imperative to at least meet growth targets and if possible exceed them produces not only a strong developmental ambition but also authoritarian state practice.45 There is evidence of peasants being instructed to conform to a project with tacit rather than explicit consent and in these cases peasants might mistrust or fear that government while ostensibly participating. In some cases crops have been dug up or destroyed if they do not conform to development plans, peasants have been fined for not growing the right crops and have even been beaten, incarcerated and threatened with eviction after disobeying instructions.46

Assessing agrarian change

In sum, there are three facets in Rwanda’s agrarian strategy: a productivist developmental- ism, a concern with general material well-being expressed centrally through cooperatives

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and a top-down statism which aims to reorder agrarian society. Progress in output levels and chain integration and upgrading has been achieved within extremely difficult circum- stances. However, whatever developmental progress one considers to have been achieved raises questions about the rights and freedoms of peasants faced with a concerted and determined set of state interventions.

let us start here by taking a step back. agrarian change within capitalist political econ- omies does not mean moving through stages or following a model. There is no necessary ‘death of the peasantry’ or specific ‘articulation’ of a peasant mode of production. Historically and theoretically agrarian change is diverse and open-ended. landlords can become capital- ists, smallholders can become specialised commercial farmers, governments can implement land reforms to create new peasantries, existing peasant farmers combine farming with other income-earning activities, peasant societies can differentiate, generating increasing amounts of wage labour within villages or rural regions, plantations can emerge or grow, generating new forms of agrarian wage labour, traumatic events such as war or famine can decimate peasant societies, changes in global markets can ‘re-peasantise’ (for want of a less clumsy term) rural spaces, outgrower schemes can tie smallholders into contract farming, and so on. as a meta-question, the agrarian question happily encompasses all these historical processes within an ‘analysis of the place of small-scale petty commodity producing peasant farming and rural labour in contemporary developing capitalist countries under the sway of globalising capital and the ongoing expansion of capitalism in agriculture’.47

among a diversity of methodologies and specific framings of the agrarian question, there is a core consensus to address this question through a historical materialist approach in which accumulation is a social process that involves the (re)distribution of political authority, technological change, changes in property relations, and considerable social contestation concerning both the terms of social change and the capture of any benefits that accrue. as such, we have a ready framework within which to understand the three facets of the GoR’s response to its particular agrarian question as an integrated and complex whole – one which, when put in historical context, is likely to highlight difficult, dirty and even ‘tragic’ charac- teristics in agrarian change; one which is not predisposed to refer to a prelapsarian agrarian condition or a counter-factual non-capitalist or ‘grassroots’ alternative.

The current agricultural strategy does directly address the historical circumstances of Rwanda’s peasantry. It fixes clearly defined land tenure within the countryside,48 it (re)asserts state power, it intervenes concertedly to promote increases in production and productiv- ity, and the cooperative model aims to address the tension between small landholdings and a scale of production that allows some peasants to ‘upgrade’ their market interactions. although there has been some commandeering of land by the state and the dispossession of swampland (previous used as common land) to lease to commercial interests, there has not been a process of ‘land grabbing’ on a large scale. In Rwanda’s historical circumstances it is difficult to identify a superior alternative strategy for agriculture without significantly downplaying the difficult political circumstances of the country or without assuming that there will be some kind of massive positive production response from smallholders without the pervasive top-down reordering and material support that the state is pursuing. It is perhaps significant that there is no extant modelling of what an alternative might look like, although it is implied frequently in the literature that criticises the government’s authori- tarian practices.49 From 1994 onwards, with an average landholding of less than a hectare per household,50 and a generally adverse context for staple food production as a means

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to generate wealth, in what ways might a stable process of expanded accumulation be generated without strong state intervention of a kind broadly similar to that of the current government? To my knowledge there is nothing in the research that addresses this question.

However, it is hardly sufficient simply to state that, in regard to Rwanda’s current agricul- tural strategy ‘there is no alternative’ and then to resign oneself to whatever the ‘hard realities’ of agricultural development are. There is an important distinction between a realistic and historically contextualised evaluation of Rwanda’s agrarian question and a consequential- ism within which hardships and disruptions are justified by (anticipated) later outcomes. This section engages with the academic literature on Rwanda’s agricultural development in order to highlight the political tensions and equivocations within the country’s agricultural development.

The strongest theme in the academic research on Rwanda’s agrarian societies since 1994 has been the reassertion of state authority over peasant societies. The common argument in this literature is that state power has cowed peasants into a submissive state. Changes in land ownership,51 the implementation of Gacaca hearings, the creation of imidugudu reset- tlement villages, the ‘capture’ of cooperatives by government-aligned elites have all revealed that agricultural development is in good part a project of state power projection into rural societies.52 The outcome of this is that a fair amount of the literature takes on a certain kind of political aesthetic in which peasants conform to state order but harbour within them a fear and dislike of the government. This is most detailed in Thompson who, like others,53 relies on the writing of James Scott to characterise rural power dynamics as a ‘high modernist’ state against a peasantry that deploys the ‘weapons of the weak’ and ‘hidden transcripts’ that only determined investigative research can get at.

The core of the critical concern within this literature is based in three inter-related argu- ments: that the RPF government represses public identities based in ethnicity;54 that the agrarian strategy it is pursuing leads to differentiation;55 and that it is authoritarian.56 In its darkest formulation it implies to a recrudescence of mass violence.57 Inasmuch as it is a critique of the RPF itself and its political choices, there is an implied – but not specified – assumption that Rwanda’s agrarian question could be addressed differently.

let us make some comments not so much on the validity of these criticisms – which are usually but not always backed up with strong research evidence – but on their import and meaning, connecting back to the historically contextualised challenges of Rwanda’s circumstances. First, it is difficult to imagine how the RPF, having defeated the rump of the predecessor government which had carried out a genocide, would not aim to suppress social identities based in ethnicity. There are some aspects of Rwanda’s politics of ethnicity which are more troublesome than others, perhaps most germanely the difficulties the RPF has in including the fact that tens of thousands of Hutu Rwandans died during the geno- cide in its official memorialisations and its capacious interpretation of ‘genocide ideology’. But the fact that it is effectively prohibited to make a public address that evokes ethnicity seems altogether less easily understood as oppression. Many rural areas have had to work through the return and resettlement of different groups whose migration was an outcome of previous waves of ethnically defined violence. These waves have involved both Hutu and Tutsi people. allocating land, houses, official positions, development resources and contracts in the countryside have all been effected through strong state action purposefully done through discourses of ‘Rwandanness’. Many of the people experiencing these forms of state action still hold strong identifications as Tutsi and Hutu, although the nature of this

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identity is hardly unchanging or antagonistic, as all the good research on Rwandan ethnicity shows us.58 The re-emergence of ethnic populist discourses about Hutu subordination would hardly be tolerable in Rwanda’s current circumstances. Historically multiparty competition in Rwanda has always led to the mobilisation of ethnic identities, as well as to high levels of tension and instability, what de lame calls ‘partisan polyphony’.59 The point here is simply that a more ‘liberal’ approach to enduring ethnic tensions in Rwanda is, seen in historical context, hardly a straightforwardly good idea.

The concern that Rwanda’s agricultural strategy is creating differentiation is central to an evaluation of agricultural development. It is worth noting initially that the GoR has generated three detailed surveys of socioeconomic categorisations (eICV) and used these categori- sations to provide support for the poorest, for example through Girinka. Rural poverty has fallen but not at a great pace. The GoR is currently prioritising concerns with malnutrition and stunting which are – in a more comprehensive way than Girinka – aimed at the poorest households (and especially children) within rural areas. Some research suggests that incomes within cooperatives have improved,60 while case studies reveal differentiation and ‘control grabs’.61 So a simple summary statement that the GoR wants to separate the ‘wheat from the chaff ’ seems misplaced or pre-emptive.62 again, an insistent question that brings us to address Rwanda’s concrete circumstances is: what kinds of strategy would make for a more egalitarian rural transformation?

one answer to this question would be to sketch a less purposefully transformed small- holder political economy within which new technologies are taken on gradually as and when farmers consider it prudent to do so, the scaling-up or upgrading of production takes place through the organic coming together of specific groups under their own motivation, and land allocation continues to be effected through hybrid systems of inheritance and informal- ised land markets. one can intuitively understand this as a pleasing political image, based in peasant agency, complex and organic rural communities deciding their own destinies, and so on. But one cannot expect that a relatively laissez-faire and reactive state strategy would generate large production responses or create a broad and ambitious taking-up of new crops, fertilisers, etc. It would also be less likely that private companies would invest as much in agriculture. Rwanda’s smallholder agriculture is characterised by small landhold- ings, low-productivity technologies and low incomes, and Rwanda’s rural communities are not stable timeless collectivities but rather mixtures of new and old social ties tenaciously trying to find modes of livelihood in the midst of enduring social trauma. In light of this, the peasant populist approach – which has received its fair share of criticism even in wealthier and less traumatised african countries – seems unlikely to generate positive responses to Rwanda’s agrarian question.

In this context any Rwandan government that wishes to promote development and growth will have to intervene heavily in peasant agriculture. This will involve impositions on peasant farmers, some or many of which will be resented or conformed to out of admix- tures of fatalism and a sense of powerlessness. But it might be more interesting and nuanced to consider the nature of state intervention in agriculture not simply as the imposition of authority (which it clearly is), (and in a sense of course it is) but as the interplay between three kinds of process: the promotion of improved agricultural productivity and peasant incomes; the inclusion of peasants in the ‘national project’ through collective works, meet- ings, the provision of universal schooling and health insurance; and the penetration of rural communities by the market through contractualised and governed chain integration.

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It is this author’s impression (from fieldwork in other east african countries and the existing research on state–peasant relations) that peasant attitudes towards state power are sophis- ticated and commonly entertain a formulation of a certain kind of tension or even paradox: a desire not to be imposed upon by the state and an anxiety that the state might leave them behind and as a result they might not get access to the benefits of ‘development’. This might be considered a version of Polanyi’s ‘double movement’,63 a legitimacy constructed on the tensions between promoting agrarian change and imposing state authority. It would be pre-emptive and one-sided simply to bracket the development aspects off and focus exclusively on state authoritarianism.

Conclusion

This article has argued that, in Rwanda’s specific historical context, and with a realistic under- standing of the agrarian question and the possibilities that it offers for agrarian transition, the current agricultural strategy displays the beginnings of an effective agricultural development strategy. There is considerable debate and uncertainty concerning the practices that underpin the realisation of this strategy: the authoritarian aspects of governance both underpin pur- posive transformation and a general imposition of change on peasant farmers.64 But, within the context of an agrarian question that recognises that development is a difficult process of material progress, uncertainty and forceful political endeavour, it would be pre-emptive to draw the conclusion that the authoritarian aspects of the GoR’s agricultural strategy mean that it will fail, that better alternatives can easily be found, or that history is repeating itself.65

It is not at all self-evident that a more openly contested multiparty democracy would improve peasants’ livelihoods or even given them significantly greater levels of participation in governance. There is no easily identified grassroots approach to agriculture in Rwanda, bearing in mind the social traumas of the recent past, the density of settlement and the lack of unused land. In light of this, the serious concerns about peasants’ lack of power or the top-down practices of the Rwandan state are means to think through the problems with existing policies and to consider how those practices might be changed. Processes like crop intensification, the zoning of crop production and villagisation are not complete (although some of the literature implies that they are); like all processes of development, agrarian transformation is a matter of decades not years. There is the political and practical possibility that the current strategy, accompanied by more state action in some areas, less in others and more flexibility throughout would frame Rwanda’s agrarian question in the most positive way that one can reasonably expect. This is not to say that this will happen, or to defend the government unequivocally. It is simply to recognise Rwanda’s realities and the nature of capitalist development, and to choose to see the future as not entirely foreclosed.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all the interviewees in Rwanda, who were very generous with their time. I am also very grateful for referees’ comments.

Notes on contributor

Graham Harrison is a professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is an editor of Review of african Political economy and New Political economy. He has published five books on various aspects

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of africa and development as well as numerous articles. He is currently researching Rwanda’s devel- opment and broader models of capitalist transformation in africa.

Notes 1. akram-lodhi and Kay, “Surveying the agrarian Question,” 257. 2. akram-lodhi and Kay go on to identify seven distinct formulations of the agrarian question.

See also Bernstein, “agrarian Questions Then and Now.” 3. Vogel, “The Tragedy of History”; Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism; and Cramer, Civil War

is Not a Stupid Thing. It is no coincidence that some of the best research on the causes and dynamics of civil war are analyses of crises in agrarian social relations.

4. Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing. 5. Bernstein, “Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’.” 6. Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression. 7. Newbury and Newbury, “Bringing the Peasants Back In.” 8. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis; and Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. 9. Newbury, “Returning Refugees.” 10. Newbury, “Returning refugees,” 270ff. The dRC was at the time the recently independent

Republic of the Congo, later renamed Zaire (1971) by President Mobutu. It became the dRC in 1997.

11. The notion of ‘Hutu power’ returned ominously in the build-up to the genocide. 12. Verwimp, Peasants in Power. 13. Uvin, “difficult Choices.” 14. andre and Platteau, “land Relations under Unbearable Stress.” 15. de lame, A Hill among a Thousand. 16. Chossudovsky, Globalization of Poverty; and Storey, “Structural adjustment.” 17. Storey, “economics and ethnic Conflict,” 49. 18. lonsdale, “Moral ethnicity and Political Tribalism.” detailed accounts of this period tend to

portray Habyarimana as losing power to a political elite based in the northwest, focused around the city of Gisenyi and the social affinities of Mme agathe Habyarimana, the president’s wife.

19. one manifestation of this was the fact that, as men were mobilised to kill, leaders would often deploy agrarian metaphors about work and cutting. although guns were distributed throughout the country, the main weapon of the genocide was the iconic farming tool, the machete. The ‘work’ metaphor came out in the narratives of former génocidaires in Hatzfield, Machete Season.

20. The genocide commenced in Kigali with the killings of the politically liberal Hutu elite and Tutsi people in general.

21. Hatzfield, Machete Season; and Straus, The Order of Genocide. Interahamwe is variously translated from Kinyarwanda – usually as ‘those who hunt together’ – and refers to the genocidal militias.

22. Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards. 23. andre and Platteau, “land Relations under Unbearable Stress.” 24. Relatedly, see Hickey, “Beyond ‘Poverty Reduction’.” 25. Golooba-Mutebi, The Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa, 2; and van Hoywegen,

“The Urgency,” 354. 26. Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards, 109. 27. In the years after the genocide aid to Rwanda was fairly limited and in fact more resources

were probably going to the refugee camps in the dRC and therefore to some degree to the remaining génocidaire militias.

28. Marysse et al., “The aid ‘darlings’ and ‘orphans’”; and Uvin, “difficult Choices.” 29. Gacaca is a neo-traditional open-hearing process that aimed to process those suspected

of participating in the genocide through confessionals, testament and decisions by locally selected judges. The best overview of Gacaca’s fortunes is Clark, The Gacaca Courts; and Clark, “Negotiating Reconciliation in Rwanda.”

368 G. HaRRISoN

30. Huggins, “land Grabbing and land Tenure Security”; and Kimanuka, Sub-Saharan Africa’s Development Challenges. at times Singapore was referred to analogously, and the president from 2000 onwards, Paul Kagame, was personally influence by the writings of lee Kwan yew.

31. IFad, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 2. 32. The percentage of those living in absolute poverty declined from 56.7% to 44.9% between

2006/7 and 2010/11 and there was a reduction in the Gini coefficient from 0.52 to 0.49. UNdP, Rwanda, 16. These are national figures but bearing in mind that about 85% of Rwanda’s population live in rural areas, it seems reasonable to assume that national changes in inequality and poverty are reflected in rural areas. See ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?”; and IFad, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project.

33. Vinck, Rwanda Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis. 34. IFad, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 1. 35. ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?,” 8. 36. IFad, Climate Resilient Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project, 2. 37. Huggins, “land Grabbing and land Tenure Security.” Villagisation in these three countries

involved millions of people being relocated into large grid-like villages of thousands of people, whereas imidugudu villages are smaller, less rigidly planned and more often connected to administrative and social provision.

38. Verhofstadt and Maertens, Cooperative Membership and Agricultural Performance, 8. 39. a fascinating contrasting case study of cooperative development is ansoms et al., “The

Reorganization of Rural Space in Rwanda.” 40. These joint programmes are funded by the World Bank. 41. See ansoms, “Re-engineering Rural Society,” 305–308. 42. van Hoywegen, “The Urgency of land and agrarian Reform”; and de lame, A Hill among a

Thousand, 42. 43. The GoR has moved from monopolising the importation of fertiliser to a licensing of imports and

a maintenance of standards in fertilisers. It is currently moving towards a regulated competitive market in fertiliser importation and retail.

44. Most importantly decentralisation of local government and the land laws issued in after the cadastral survey and registration of land.

45. ansoms, “Re-engineering Rural Society.” 46. ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?,” 17; and Pritchard, “land, Power and Peace.” 47. Hakram-lodhi and Kay, “‘Surveying the agrarian Question,” 179. 48. Through legislation and a comprehensive cadastral survey. 49. ansoms et al. argue for a strategy of ‘broad-based growth founded on small-scale agricultural

activity’. ansoms et al., “The Reorganization of Rural Space in Rwanda,” 181. But it is at this point that the narrative moves away from Rwanda’s situation to outline a general set of points relating to pro-smallholder approaches.

50. Fifty per cent of rural households currently farm less than 0.5 hectares. Golooba-Mutebi, Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa, 2. ‘Mirroring the rise in population density over the last forty years from 121 to over 350 persons per square kilometre, the national average land parcel size has dropped from 2 ha in 1960 to 0.35 in 2007.’ Pritchard, “land, Power and Peace,” 188.

51. leegwater, “Sharing Scarcity.” 52. Huggins, “‘Control Grabbing and Small-scale agricultural Intensification.” 53. Thompson, Whispering Truth to Power; leegwater, “Sharing Scarcity”; and Purdekova, “Rendering

Rwanda Governable.” 54. Chakravarty, “Navigating the Middle Ground.” 55. ansoms, “Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor?” 56. Reyntjens, Political Governance. 57. des Forges, “land in Rwanda.” 58. Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression; and des Forges, Defeat is the only Bad News. 59. de lame, A Hill among a Thousand, 468. 60. Verhofstadt and Maertens, Cooperative Membership, 14. 61. Huggins, “land Grabbing and land Tenure Security.”

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62. des Forges, “land in Rwanda.” 63. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 64. Pritchard, “land, Power and Peace.” 65. as is implied in Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards, 124ff.

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