Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The general image of large-scale commercial farming in South Africa is one of technological dynamism and international competitiveness. However, such a generalisation obscures considerable differentiation in terms of size, scale, capital reproduction strategies and future directions of change between and within farming regions. My study on reproduction, accumulation and differentiation in the large-scale commercial farming sector makes a small contribution towards explaining this substantive diversity, as well as the underlying processes at work, in three different agro-ecological regions of the country. A framework to analyse the strategies of large-scale commercial farmers was derived from volume 1 of Marx’s Capital and interpretations thereof by Marxist scholars, e.g. Ernest Mandel, Henry Bernstein, David Harvey, Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho. The four strategies or processes are broadly identified as a) expanding the scale or scope of production, in other words, to increase the capital intensity of production and/or geographic size, and/or the number of products, b) expanding the scale or scope of the business by expanding into new enterprises either up or down the value chain, c) increasing economic efficiency, which can be achieved by means of lowering the cost of commodity production, increasing productivity in terms of yield per hectare or per animal through technical and biological efficiency, or by organising workers and tasks to make workers as productive as possible, and d) taking part in political action in order to reduce uncertainties and/or establish preferential access to and control over key resources, markets or policy processes. Data from a questionnaire survey conducted with 141 large-scale commercial farmers in Limpopo, the Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces, as well as semi-structured interviews with 32 farmers in these regions were analysed to determine the most prevalent strategies and assess their outcomes. The outcomes of these strategies varied between and within regions and resulted in the differentiation of capitalist farmers into “accumulators”, “successful reproducers”, “struggling reproducers” and “simple commodity producers”. This approach helps to uncover processes and patterns of agrarian change, and provides a richer, more detailed, understanding of the dynamics of change in the large-scale farming sector of South Africa which can help inform debates on policy optionsfor the sector and for land reform.

Cette thèse, réalisée au Cameroun, analyse les stratégies et les trajectoires d’accumulation en surfaces cacaoyères de trois générations de planteurs couvrant la période 1910-2010. Pour cela, nous avons réalisé des entretiens semi directifs auprès d’un échantillon de 82 planteurs représentatifs des différentes tailles d’exploitations cacaoyères. L’analyse des trajectoires montre que si l’accumulation en surfaces cacaoyères est de quelques hectares pour les deux premières générations de planteurs, la génération actuelle conduit depuis trente ans, surtout dans les zones de fronts pionniers, des processus d’accumulation pouvant atteindre plusieurs dizaines d’hectares. Ces hauts niveaux d’accumulation en surfaces cacaoyères sont majoritairement le fait d’exploitants disposant d’importants volumes de capitaux financiers provenant d’activités non agricoles, généralement urbaines. La mobilité spatiale, vers les fronts pionniers ou vers la ville, et la mobilité professionnelle, qui permet de mêler activités agricoles et non agricoles, apparaissent ainsi comme les stratégies les plus performantes pour accumuler d’importantes surfaces cacaoyères. Ces stratégies conduisent au développement de grandes exploitations cacaoyères patronales ou capitalistes qui renforcent les processus de marchandisation de la terre et de la force de travail. Ces grandes exploitations entrent en concurrence pour l’accès au foncier avec les petites exploitations familiales et conduisent à une prolétarisation d’une partie des agriculteurs les plus pauvres. Ces résultats incitent à développer des politiques de recherche moins centrées sur l’amélioration des pratiques techniques et des rendements et plus attentives à la mobilité de la force de travail et des capitaux financiers entre les différents secteurs de l’économie nationale et du territoire. Ils invitent aussi L’Etat à ne pas abandonner au seul jeu du marché la gestion et le devenir des hommes et des territoires. / This thesis, which was undertaken in Cameroon, analyses the cocoa surface area accumulation trajectories and strategies of three generations of cocoa planters, covering the period 1910-2010. To do so, we carried out semi-structured interviews with a sample of 82 planters representing different sized cocoa plantations. The analysis of their trajectories shows that while the first two generations of planters accumulated just a few hectares of cocoa land, over the past thirty years, the current generation has accumulated several dozens of hectares, particularly in the frontier areas. Farmers with large amounts of financial capital generated through non-agricultural, and generally urban, activities mainly are responsible for these high levels of accumulation of cacao land. Spatial mobility, in the direction of the frontier regions or towards the city, and professional mobility, which allows agricultural and non-agricultural activities to be mixed, thus appears to be the most effective strategy for accumulating large surface areas for cocoa production. These strategies lead to the development of large capitalist and enterprise cocoa plantations that reinforce the commoditization of land and labour. These large plantations compete with small family farms over land, leading to the proletarianisation of some of the poorest farmers. These results suggest that there is a need to develop research policies which focus less on improving technical practices and yields and more on the mobility of the labour force and of financial capital between the different sectors of the national economy and between regions. The results also indicate that the government should not abandon the management and future of these people and territories to the free market alone.