Abstract
Tropical countries are often blamed for not managing their natural resources sustainably. But what if overexploitation is inherent in political structures and policies—rooted in foreign colonial order—and is consistently detrimental in the contemporary use of forestlands? This article argues that post-colonial land development policies and related political interests seriously impede the sustainability of forest ecosystems in Côte d’Ivoire. Methodologically, the study builds on a historic contextualisation of forestland use policies in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Côte d’Ivoire serving as a case study. The results indicate that the increasing development of so-called rent crops clearly follows the historical dynamics of ‘land grabbing’ and a post-colonial agrarian model. This situation benefits agribusiness entrepreneurs and, more recently, sustainability standards. The study discusses the findings based on recent literature and empirical evidence. In conclusion, the post-colonial heritage and the manipulation of the related patterns by elites and policy-makers largely explains the present-day unsustainable forestland conversions in Côte d’Ivoire.
Highlights
In tropical zones, the dynamics of economic prosperity and development are closely connected to forestland use
We reviewed the genealogy of the logic behind land “optimisation” in the history of the political economics of agricultural dynamics on the one hand and the African development policies on the other
Besides this historiographic analysis that covers the end of the 19th century to the contemporary forestland transformation, we reviewed the scientific literature on the uses and exploitation of these spaces in tropical Africa in general and especially in Côte d’Ivoire
Summary
The dynamics of economic prosperity and development are closely connected to forestland use. In most cases in tropical Africa, the plantation economy, [5] with its postcolonial dynamics, is usually supported by a cycle of massive conversion of forestlands into croplands given to more or less long occupancy (oil palms, cocoa, rubber, etc.) This hasty replacement of forest ecosystems by crops in the tropical areas is part of a relatively recent process called ‘land grabbing’ [6]. To better understand the diachronic evolution of land development practices and strategies in SSA since the end of the 19th century, this article has adopted an analytical approach based on historical sociology and agrarian studies This approach requires scrutinisation, identification, and rigorous selection of lines of logic that have been documented in literature related to the topic addressed. We are interested in the question of the history of economic thought on agricultural rent, the colonial heritage of agricultural dynamics in SSA as of the end of the 19th century [14]; The impact of the “State privatisation” processes [15,16,17,18] in the 1990s; The extraversion capacities [19] of the postcolonial state and the capacity of their state bureaucracies to pretend [20] when confronted with external demands for ‘good governance’ of forestlands
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