Contract farming schemes have recently been portrayed by global development agencies as an alternative to ‘land grabs’, promoting processes of inclusive development through the integration of smallholders within global agro-industrial production complexes. The paper takes issue with such argument, using the case-study of contract farming scheme at Kakira Sugar Works in Uganda as empirical terrain for this investigation. It argues that despite contract farming schemes at first sight appear not to generate dispossession or displacement, they lead to forms of expulsion and/or marginalization of poor smallholders from sugar agro-poles through social differentiation. It also maintains that rather than being the antithesis to land enclosures, contract farming represents one instance of global neoliberal agricultural restructuring, functional to the expansion of the sugar frontier at cheap costs. This process, which I term sugarification, involves the maximization of value extraction from farmers, its appropriation by agribusiness and finance capital, and a regime of production which devaluates labour (wage and family) and nature, while dramatically affecting existing livelihoods and landscapes.

South African corporate agribusiness and large-scale commercial farmers have been major players in the current acquisitions of large tracts of very fertile land in southern and eastern Africa through massive investments in large-scale commercial farming, food processing, the production of biofuels and eco-tourism. By emphasising the significance of analysing the changing capital smallholder relationship in historical perspective, the paper explores continuity and change in the agrarian social structure and the land use dynamics of the Kilombero valley. It argues that smallholders are differentially and adversely integrated within agribusiness-led vertically organised agri-food chains consolidating and widening existing patterns of social inequality.

Since 2004, we have observed a significant resurgence of public protests and social mobilizations, both urban and rural, across the African continent. Though the multiplicity of agrarian struggles have gone largely unnoticed by academics and policy makers, rural social struggles have significantly affected the trajectories of rural social change. This article historicizes rural social struggles and explores the diverse range of discourses and forms of resistance that have animated the northern Ugandan countryside, with particular reference to the Amuru district. Initiated as a response to the wave of neoliberal agricultural restructuring through structural adjustment plans, rural social movements, and other community-based political initiatives from below, proliferated in the context of rampant large-scale land enclosures and state authoritarianism. The article suggests that such agrarian struggles be regarded as a process of contestation over the norms, values and practices, which govern the control, access and the use of natural resources such as land, water and food. It situates these struggles within the parameters of everyday peasant politics, which are driven by impulses ranging from the protection of livelihoods and local environments, to claims of autonomy and land sovereignty, and which are grounded in an ontology of the moral economy. Finally, the article engages with the question of the political relevance of localized forms of rural resistance, and how their tactics, strategies and discourses can consolidate or undermine community solidarity, attract or deter other social constituents, and stimulate or diminish equitable and sustainable rural social change.