The Food Economy and French Colonial Rule in Central Cameroun

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
French administrative policies during the inter-war period in Central Cameroun created a class of indigenous chiefs who fulfilled crucial functions in the mobilization of manpower and resources from the rural areas for the development of the European sector of the economy. Early problems in organizing food markets to provision the growing non-agricultural sector resulted in a decision to channel agricultural growth through the chiefs rather than to leave it to market forces. The institution of a food requisition system involved the administration in exercising direct control over key aspects of the rural economy through the regulation of production, price control, control of the trading network, and the use of the indigénat to support the rights of chiefs over their subjects. The system succeeded in achieving two purposes at once: it guaranteed a cheap, reliable supply of food to the wage-earning population, thus allowing wages to remain low and stable; and it encouraged the development of a class of wealthy planters in the rural areas whose self-interest lay in support for the colonial administration. However, close control of the economy became impossible in the late 1930s, and the government's dissatisfaction with some of the implications of its own chieftaincy policy resulted in the abandonment of the whole inter-war system. The rural economy which gradually emerged after 1946 was characterized by family-based production units but lacked a well-developed institutional framework appropriate to it.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: