Les politiques agricoles face au paradigme du sous-peuplement en République du Congo

Abstract

Successive outbreaks of food prices on world markets have weakened food-importation dependent countries to feed their populations. This is the case of the Republic of the Congo, an oil rentier state that has appealed to foreign agricultural investors to feed a population increasingly concentrated in the city while the countryside is depopulated, peasant agriculture having been abandoned since decades by public policy. In this context, new large farms replace those established in the colonial period, then Marxist, without causing land conflict. But they do not meet the expected success. The paper place the failure factors of current enterprises and the agro-industrial model in a historical and geopolitical perspective, questioning the links between the imbalances of the population, the decline of the peasantry and the maldevelopment, in the absence of a global project for the territory.

Keywords

• food security
• census data
• geopolitics
• large-scale land investment
• landgrabbing
• underdevelopment