Agricultural Change and the Division of Labor, Ibarapa, Western Nigeria

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This award will allow the PI to do five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Western Nigeria. She will interview small-holder farmers to analyze the effects of technical changes in farming and social changes in the organization of work in this African rural economy, which has been exposed to rapid and dramatic increases in the demand for goods. Due to the oil boom and subsequent collapse, this part of Nigeria has experienced increased rates of urbanization and food price inflation during the past 15 years. Economic change in the hinterland of cities has caused changes in family farms. This project will document farm organization in small-holder and larger scale farms with special attention to the use of labor, the gender division of labor, and the relations between small farms and large farms. The current situation will be compared with the situation 20 years ago, when the PI did a baseline study of small-holder farms. This research is important because African small-holder farmers are seen by most development theorists as the major current economic problem facing the continent. Increased understanding of how small farms function, and specifically how they relate to the newer, larger farms, and how they have withstood the boom and bust cycles that the region experienced in the previous 20 years, will be valuable to theorists and policy makers alike.