PART II CASE-STUDY: GUINEA-BISSAU
6. Migration and development in Guinea-Bissau: a macro-level overview
6.2.2 Livelihood strategies and social-productive arrangements
The diversification of livelihood strategies is an extremely widespread feature of Bissau- Guinean households and constitutes a key coping strategy in the face of low and uncertain output and income levels (Gacitua-Mario et al 2007; World Bank 2006a:43). Generally speaking, most rural households combine, in varying proportions, primary production for the household’s own consumption and simple commodity production, to which many add (usually casual) wage employment. In their turn, urban households typically engage in a variety of petty income-generating activities of a more or less independent character (depending on the cases), counting themselves fortunate when one or more household members have been able to secure stable employment in the public or modern private
73 These trading networks and individuals are especially associated with two immigrant communities (the Lebanese and the Mauritanian) and with the Fula of Guinea-Bissau and the Republic of Guinea (see also Chapter 9), which occupy overlapping but slightly different niches. Indians play an especially prominent role in the large-scale purchase and export of cashew nuts.
74 Namely, through advances on the purchase of cashew nuts to local producers.
153 sectors. Additionally, migrant remittances constitute an important source of monetary income throughout the country, and especially in the case of Bissau and the northern and eastern regions (see section 6.3, below). In the meantime, rural and urban households are anything but clear-cut groups, for multilocality itself constitutes a common livelihood strategy: temporary migration to work in urban areas is a common practice by members of rural households in relatively more accessible areas, as is intra-rural migration in search of agricultural employment by poorer households. Moreover, it is common for urban households to grow vegetable gardens in peri-urban areas75, for example, or to have some of their members participate in the cashew harvesting season – in their own groves, in those of relatives or as wage-labourers.
Rural Bissau-Guinean households are often presented as relying primarily on subsistence agriculture (Gacitua-Mario et al 2007:60). Whatever the region, however, rural households in general undertake much more than just agriculture: coastal and riverside communities engage in fishing; those within or in the vicinity of forest areas extract and explore forest products; cattle-raising is practiced around the country and especially in the Eastern hinterland (id ibid:61-62); and everywhere people engage in commerce and perform a variety of petty services to each other. On the other hand, the terms
“subsistence farming” and “subsistence agriculture” (indeed like “family farming” or
“peasant farming”) are too overarching and vague, at least from a historical materialist perspective, to cast much light on some key aspects. Concealed behind or within them are the concrete ways in which production is organised within rural households, their underlying property relations (most crucially, with respect to the land) and how it is that the surplus is appropriated or distributed (Bernstein 2003).
In rather abstract terms, we can identify four main types of rural social-productive arrangements in the Bissau-Guinean context, present in articulation with each other to varying degrees across households in the same community, and across communities and regions. These are: i) non-commodified production, typically for consumption within the household; ii); simple commodity production, i.e. relying on the household’s own resources but destined for the market; iii) tributary arrangements based on non-mercantile norms and logics; and iv) (proto-capitalist) wage labour. Few households can be neatly placed into one of these categories: the most common situation is for a household to be involved in
75 According to Gacitua-Mario et al (2007:64), as many as 30% of urban households practice small garden agriculture, covering between 60% and 80% of their demand for fresh vegetables throughout the year.
154 two or more of them, depending on the surrounding social structure, the household’s own place within that structure, customs, norms and the household’s own decisions. All of these aspects co-determine the households’ subsequent trajectory and social mobility, as well as the dynamics of the community and the social formation as a whole.
A narrower understanding of subsistence farming that does prove more useful corresponds to the production of non-commodified use-values, i.e. goods and services for the household’s own consumption or in order to be exchanged according to a logic of reciprocity76. More often than not, this concerns more than agriculture – artisan fishing, small-scale cattle-raising and forestry are all commonly practiced by many rural Bissau- Guineans in order to obtain products that are, in part or in whole, to be consumed within the household. This is most significant at the household (rather than communal) level, but community-level reciprocal logics are also quite widespread, sometimes taking on a religious-ceremonial character. In that sense, the latter cannot be neatly distinguished from tributary arrangements, which typically also take on a similar character (see below). To a lesser or larger extent, such non-commodified production is almost universal: the overwhelming majority of rural Bissau-Guinean households produce at least some food (rice, garden vegetables, maize, fish, palm oil, etc.) and other use-values for its own consumption and/or to be exchanged according to non-mercantile logics.
However, most rural households also produce for the local and/or supra-local market. Simple commodity production is most common in cashew production, which links these rural households directly with the world economy insofar as it is a cash crop destined almost exclusively for export: an estimated 67% of all rural households engage in the harvesting of cashew nuts (AEDES 2009). In many contexts, particularly in especially remote areas (like the deep South or more isolated island areas), cashew is more commonly bartered for imported rice and other products than sold for money. However, simple commodity production is not limited to cashew – almost any other product is susceptible to being exchanged as a commodity, particularly in the local market and whenever the household’s output of that product exceeds its requirements. Thus, there is no obvious distinction between simple commodity production and simple non-commodified
76 In this categorisation and for the sake of exposition, we have chosen to analytically separate tributary non-mercantile arrangements from the other non-mercantile arrangements of the type mentioned above (for the household’s own consumption and to be exchanged on the basis of reciprocity).
155 production: in many cases, we are talking about the same activities, undertaken in the same way, differing only in terms of what use is made of the output.
Tributary arrangements, too, can be found in many Bissau-Guinean rural communities, although their significance has become increasingly symbolic and residual.
Two main types of tributary arrangements can be identified: (i) those involving the payment or performance of tribute by certain age groups to older age groups; and (ii) those involving the payment or performance of tribute to chieftains in the context of “vertically-organised societies” with a nobility (Lopes 1987). The former are most prevalent in the case of the
“horizontal” Animist communities of the coast, who are organised into age groups with strictly defined rights and duties that include the performance of tribute labour by young adults to the benefit of elders (sometimes for a period of months). These arrangements, which are governed by customary norms and take on ceremonial significance, can hardly be said to constitute a mechanism generating or reinforcing social differentiation, however – instead, they should be more correctly perceived as a social security mechanism implemented at the community level (Said and Abreu 2011). In their turn, tributary arrangements to the benefit of chieftains and dominant classes were in the past an important feature of Guinea-Bissau’s Islamised class-based societies (the Fula and the Mandinga), as well as of those characterised as having an “intermediate level” of class- based hierarchy (like the Manjaco) (Lopes 1987). In all of these cases, however, the significance of these practices has waned significantly, particularly as a consequence of State repression in the colonial and post-independence eras (Gable 2003). The chieftancy institution remains in existence in most of these areas and in some cases involves the occasional payment of tribute in the form of both goods and labour. However, it is clear that the share of total social labour that takes place in the context of these arrangements is small even in those areas where it is still a reality, and that it does not constitute a significant or constraining form of surplus appropriation77.
The remaining key component in rural Guinea-Bissau’s constellation of social- productive arrangements is (proto-)capitalist wage labour. In purely abstract terms, properly capitalist wage labour involves the buying and selling of labour-power in the
77 In the case of the two case-study villages discussed in chapters 7 and 8 (below), which can probably be regarded as relatively representative in this respect, we find that tribute is indeed residual. In Caiomete, tribute labour performed for the benefit of the local and regional chieftains concerns a maximum of three or four days of annual labour (more usually, just one or two), to which adds tribute in the form of goods (like animal body parts) when certain ceremonies are undertaken.
In the case of Braima Sori, no evidence was found of tribute labour.
156 context of commodity production, but most actual labour-hiring relations in the rural Bissau-Guinean context violates one or more of these criteria – either because it is the workers’ labour (not labour-power) that is most commonly purchased (when workers are paid to perform specific tasks) and because most of the time the process does not serve to valorise what is subsequently to become a commodity (rather, it creates a use-value for the benefit of the labour-purchasing household). In this sense, few of these paid labour relations assume a properly capitalist character – often, we are instead effectively dealing with simple commodity production of goods and services, at times reflecting limited specialisation (e.g. when someone is hired to build a fence). The distinction between simple commodity production of this kind and proto-capitalist wage labour is, again, not clear-cut:
the same people can be hired to perform several different tasks, of which only a part involves an element of surplus extraction and subsequent realisation. In any case, as a general conclusion, the limited character of capitalist wage labour which obtains in this context is a consequence of the fact that only a minor share of total social labour is actually hired, and that only a minor share of that which is hired serves to valorise commodities.
The last few paragraphs make it clear that rural Guinea-Bissau is characterised by a complex co-existence of different social-productive arrangements. Straddling and diversification – of crops, activities and productive arrangements – is the norm for rural Bissau-Guinean households. This reflects the fact that most households own the means to ensure their own livelihood (however close to the subsistence threshold this may be), but also have a keen interest in taking advantage of any available opportunities to improve their food security and living standards in what is usually a near-subsistence context. In fact, the same can be said about most urban households, which also tend to spread their bets across a variety of activities: stable wage employment for those who can access it, but also all sorts of ‘informal’ petty activities – some undertaken in accordance with a logic of simple commodity production, others in the context of larger operations involving casual hiring (e.g. taxi drivers, porters, security guards, commerce, etc.).
In contexts where multiactivity (and multilocality) are quite widespread, it is particularly hard – if not spurious – to seek to rigorously quantify the relative importance of the various social-productive arrangements (or the different “employment status”: Figure 6.7). Instead, the ability to properly understand the role and importance of each of those arrangements requires close examination of the concrete contexts (as attempted in chapters 8 and 9, below). Data like those presented in the Figure below, which seek to unequivocally ascribe individuals to one category only, are inevitably imprecise and entail a
157 significant loss of information. Still, if read against the background of what has been argued above, these data can still be used to illustrate some of the general features that we have been referring to. For example, an aspect which is immediately apparent is the secondary importance of wage labour, especially in rural contexts (where “wage workers” reportedly account for 5% of the labour force). Obviously, the vast majority of those represented here as “employer/self-employed” are indeed ‘self-employed’ smallholder producers, but presumably so are most of those subsumed under the residual category “other”, which more than anything else reflects the inadequacy of the survey categories. In any case, these data are presented here because, for all their deficiencies, they constitute an example of the available attempts at quantification of this matter based on national-level surveys, and serve to illustrate some of the arguments put forth above.
12,9 42,9
58,4 60,9
48,7
28,7 33,9
8,5
5,2
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Total Rural Urban
Wage worker
Employer/Self-employed
"Other"
Figure 6.7 Guinea-Bissau: Employment status of the economically active population (rural, urban and total)78
The scarcity of reliable quantitative data does not prevent us from safely reaching the key conclusions presented thus far. This is a predominantly non-capitalist social formation that is fully integrated in a capitalist world economy. Several different logics co- exist and articulate with each other, but nevertheless gravitate around a substantial core of simple independent production – especially in the rural areas where most people live. The predominantly non-capitalist character of production significantly accounts for the relative stagnation of the social formation. There have been some important changes over the last few decades, including the increasing turn to cashew production; increasing market mediation between production and consumption; and the expansion and development of
78 Estimation based on 2002 Light Household Survey. Source: World Bank 2006.
158 an urban sector revolving around trade and the public sector. However, the livelihoods of most rural households have not fundamentally changed, reliant as they remain on independent smallholder production combined with whatever income-generating opportunities may be advantageously taken advantage of. In view of all this, what can we say, then, about the reasons for the relative failure of the transition to capitalism to occur?