Women sowing okra in Chad. alina/Flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Exploitation in the agricultural sector usually results from the subordinate position of workers engaged as farmhands or sharecroppers. Their weak bargaining position vis-à-vis land owners prevents them from fighting back against low salaries or unequally shared harvest revenues. This does not mean, however, that a farmer is secure when he owns the land he farms. He is not. Small farmers’ dependence on agricultural cycles force them to borrow money to buy inputs at the beginning of the seeding season and, consequently, to quickly sell the crops after the harvest – when the prices are lower – to repay the debt. This dynamic has been described in various African contexts where small farmers are engaged, with urging from the state, in farming cash crops like cocoa or coffee.
In this article I want to tackle a case where the weakness of farmers towards traders puts them in positions of extreme exploitation, namely the debt contracted by farmers producing cereals in the Guéra region of central Chad. Here farmers are pressed to take loans from the traders of their main crop, often at such high interest rates that they become locked into debt and obliged to give most if not all the harvest away to service that debt. In this situation, the farmer maintains ownership over the land he farms but loses control of its products.
