Land as a Pre-Condition to Access the National Maize Support Program in Cameroon: A Study of Exclusion in the North West Region

This paper explores the question of how the land tenure system in the North West Region of Cameroon affects rural farmers‟ access to the National Support Program to the Maize Sub-Sector (NSPMS) in Cameroon. It does this by confronting NSPMS‟s assumptions about farmers‟ access to land with, the land tenure question existing in the Region. The paper uses an analytical framework which links land tenure institutions, processes of group formation and social exclusion to challenge these assumptions. Principally, NSPMS assumes that, access to land is not a problem for all farmers if they organize themselves into Farming Groups (FG). This paper questions this assumption and treats it as being highly problematic and exclusionary for a program which aims at reducing rural poverty. Rather, this paper argues that, following the nature of the African land question, traditional chiefs do not mainly administer land for the benefit of their subjects in an era of increased land commoditization. Traditional land administration in this era is highly knitted into economic and social relations of power and status which thus suggest high risks of discrimination and exclusion. As such, the paper seeks to add to the knowledge of how mechanisms of social exclusion could be rooted in land tenure institutions but go unnoticed and, continue to further nurture other forms of disadvantage, inequality, exclusion and great vulnerability to acute poverty. This paper locates itself within Shivji‟s (2008) line of argument which points to the fact that, beyond the agrarian question in Africa is a land question. The findings of this research suggest disparities between; expectations of NSPMS in their grant making assumptions and, field realities experienced by small scale maize farmers. Instead, there was group polarization. FG‟s which had land were all made of people of similar social status in terms of their privileged position to access land while, landless groups were mostly made of socio-culturally discriminated categories of farmers. In this regard, there was no mixed group (both landless farmers and landlords) which had received grants. Only the polarized landed groups made of landlords had received grants. Ensuing from this divide therefore, this paper concludes by questioning the adoption of FG as a strategy to include majority of landless maize farmers by NSPMS. Rather, this paper is of the stance that, with the current land tenure question and, NSPMS grants conditions, there seem to be the gradual emergence of a classed rural society made up of landlords and the landless. This is because, the blurred mix of customary and statutory tenures provides for lobbying and „land grabbing‟ by the elite and, NSPMS through its grant making scheme is rather reinforcing the class situation by adding other forms of capital to the landlords while the landless are progressively being excluded from such capital accumulating programs. Relevance to Development Studies Poverty and its eradication is one of the core concerns of development studies and literature on the subject tends to conceptualize rural poverty mainly as a lack of resources. Thus, efforts towards its reduction have often been to give the poor these resources. However, even when these resources are distributed, the poor continue to find it hard to access them. By analyzing how inequalities imbedded in social institutions tend to deprive and exclude the poor from accessing resources distributed by NSPMS, this research seeks to, contribute to the re-conceptualization of rural poverty as a socio-political process imbedded in societal institutions.