Making land-use change and markets: the global-local entanglement of producing rice in Bagré, Burkina Faso

Abstract

Since the 1970s the government of Burkina Faso together with international donor organizations has pushed for increasing national rice production to cope with the country’s food import dependency. This paper traces this development and illustrates that rice production in Burkina Faso is the outcome of interrelated global and local processes. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso the paper sketches the historical, legal and socioeconomic conditions, challenges and practices behind the increasing rice production. Focusing on the Bagré Growth Pole Project, we describe how particular configurations of local, national and global connections and disconnections around the creation of a Burkinabe rice market are brought into being. A major point of the paper is to illustrate that combining systemic and processual theoretical perspectives is highly illuminating in this respect. Concretely, the paper achieves this by bringing into dialogue the telecoupling literature concerned with the globalization of land-use change and the geographies of marketization literature focusing on market-making practices. This allows understanding the rice market described as an ongoing and grounded process within a global systemic configuration.