ABSTRACT
What about labour in the value extraction process which large-scale plantations rely on? Despite the frequently high labour intensity of capitalist agricultural schemes in Southern countries, most of the literature about global land-grabbing implicitly suggests land dispossession and ground rent to be the sole accumulation mechanisms at stake. Based on a long run ethnographic survey in three giant agro-industrial complexes, this chapter focusses on the contrary on the peculiar labour regimes these enterprises historically built in Cameroon (Central Africa). Studying life trajectories, labour practices and the everyday life of the workers, the author shows that Cameroonian agro-industry offers an example of the way wage-labour can itself be a vehicle for dispossession, a process that has recently been recognized as core to capitalist continuous development. The chapter thus studies the accumulation process from below, reconstructing the point of view of the workers, men and women, old and young. It describes how the labour and pay regimes conform a grip on the workers’ gendered bodies, and insists on the lifestyles and tactics deployed by those living in the plantations. Debating recent literature about capitalism and exploitation, the chapter pleads for a renewed interest in labour ethnographies.
