Technological change in agriculture and socio-economic transformation in northern Sudan, 1900-1980

• Main Author: Abdel-Ati, H. A.
• Published: Swansea University 1983
• Subjects: 337
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.635827

Over this century agriculture in Northern Sudan has substantially been commercialized, a process that accompanied the development of irrigation technology, when diesel pumps started to replace traditional sagias (waterwheel). The colonial state's fostering of that change was manifested in: a) its establishment of large pump schemes; b) the stress it put on peasants through taxation and land registration to stimulate cash crop production; and c) promoting the growth and gearing into agriculture of private capital, providing such incentives as land leases, tax exemptions and technical assistance. Private capital was also attracted to agriculture by the worldwide boom in crop prices during the late 1930's, and centred mainly in installing pumps to supply peasants with irrigation water on a crop-share basis, but sometimes involved establishing pump schemes. That capital was accumulated from trade profits, shail lending, investment in auxiliary services and, more recently, investment in agriculture, both within and outside the region. Pump irrigation made available more land and marked the emergence of a landlord-class, subletting leased government lands or amalgamated plots, hired for cash, mostly with irrigation water. Cashcrop production expanded as the concentration on food crops, dictated by the sagia, was broken down. Similarly the use of wage labour increased gradually replacing the sagia's family labour. Although the sagia pre-capitalist system was shattered, a capitalist system did not follow. The crop-share arrangement is one of the surviving sagia elements that seems to have persisted because it allows for more surplus extraction from peasants, than could be otherwise. The consequences of change were the expansion of exchange relations, landlessness and income differentiation. Theoretically the study highlights the utility of the concept of articulation between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production, where the reproduction of the former is largely blocked by the latter whose reproduction depends partly, on the continuation of certain elements of the former.