On The Class Location Of Contract Farmers In The Kenyan Economy

The purpose of this paper is to address some contemporary issues in the debate about rural social transformation: the so called ‘peasantry debate’. In order to clarifty these issues, we discuss material collected in Kenya on tobacco contract farming. Our intention is to integrate theoretical and substantive analyses of the current Kenyan situation. Tobacco farming is, we argue, a particularly clear instance of a form of subsumption of petty commodity production to capital. Although British-American Tobacco concentrates all the moments of capital–productive, circulating, and merchant –within a unified organisational framework, it enters the local growersapos; economy in the form of merchant capital. Combined with the active support of the Kenyan state, this has the effect of shoring up the household productive form. However, it does not (as some would argue) create a class of rural accumulators. Household production is sustained only at subsistence level. Contract farming is not, in our view, an ‘agent of transformation’ although pressures from the world economy might in time, have the effect of eroding the present form of exchange between Bat (K) and tobacco growers.