Accessing Global Capital Through Remittance: A Route to the Reconfiguration of the Peasant Mode of Production in Rural Eritrea

Abstract

Migration and its resultant remittance have become the two powerful forces of peasant transformation in Eritrea in the last decade. If the former is responsible for uprooting labor from land, the latter is a replacement value to what the labor would have produced from the land. Using qualitative data gathered through an ethnographic fieldwork in the peasant region, this article argues that these two forces—migration and remittance—have resulted in gradual divorce of peasants from their means of production, land, in ways that seemingly appear productive to the peasants, rural–urban migration and a new form of relationship between peasants and state. In general, the outcome of the entire process is the emergence of quasi-peasant society which no more depends on land for survival because remittance has provided them alternative source. Therefore, migration and remittance in Eritrea have not only resulted in massive uprooting of labor from the land, but also heavily reconfigured the peasant mode of production.