Dépasser l’enclavement : le maraîchage des savanes et l’approvisionnement d’Abidjan

Abstract

The article concerns the recent and unexpected market garden specialization of the savannas. This specialization is partially directed to the supply of Abidjan, even though the region is quite remote from the urbanized coast and by this fact considered as enclosed. The study is based on a field work realized from 1999 till 2001 with market-gardeners distributed on either sides of the border between Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. The fine analysis of the practices of the actors invites to renew the notion of enclosing, too often likened in the case of the West Africa’s savannas to their simple estrangement of the coast and its metropo lises. The article proposes a broader meaning, relative and especially combined notions of enclosing and opening-up accord ing to the scales of observation, the actors and the frame of analysis. Choices and behaviours of the actors prove that the enclosing is certainly a complex concept because changing, according to innovative and evolutionary endogenous practices both by internal transformations of the rural societies and in answer to external determinants in witch these societies take part, as the increasing internationalization of the economies.

Keywords

• cash crops
• enclosing
• savanna
• socio-spatial differentiation
• West Africa