This paper explores the question of how the land tenure system in the North
West Region of Cameroon affects rural farmers‟ access to the National
Support Program to the Maize Sub-Sector (NSPMS) in Cameroon. It does this
by confronting NSPMS‟s assumptions about farmers‟ access to land with, the
land tenure question existing in the Region. The paper uses an analytical
framework which links land tenure institutions, processes of group formation
and social exclusion to challenge these assumptions. Principally, NSPMS
assumes that, access to land is not a problem for all farmers if they organize
themselves into Farming Groups (FG). This paper questions this assumption
and treats it as being highly problematic and exclusionary for a program which
aims at reducing rural poverty.
Rather, this paper argues that, following the nature of the African land
question, traditional chiefs do not mainly administer land for the benefit of
their subjects in an era of increased land commoditization. Traditional land
administration in this era is highly knitted into economic and social relations of
power and status which thus suggest high risks of discrimination and exclusion.
As such, the paper seeks to add to the knowledge of how mechanisms of social
exclusion could be rooted in land tenure institutions but go unnoticed and,
continue to further nurture other forms of disadvantage, inequality, exclusion
and great vulnerability to acute poverty. This paper locates itself within Shivji‟s
(2008) line of argument which points to the fact that, beyond the agrarian
question in Africa is a land question.
The findings of this research suggest disparities between; expectations of
NSPMS in their grant making assumptions and, field realities experienced by
small scale maize farmers. Instead, there was group polarization. FG‟s which
had land were all made of people of similar social status in terms of their
privileged position to access land while, landless groups were mostly made of
socio-culturally discriminated categories of farmers. In this regard, there was
no mixed group (both landless farmers and landlords) which had received
grants. Only the polarized landed groups made of landlords had received
grants.
Ensuing from this divide therefore, this paper concludes by questioning
the adoption of FG as a strategy to include majority of landless maize farmers
by NSPMS. Rather, this paper is of the stance that, with the current land
tenure question and, NSPMS grants conditions, there seem to be the gradual
emergence of a classed rural society made up of landlords and the landless.
This is because, the blurred mix of customary and statutory tenures provides
for lobbying and „land grabbing‟ by the elite and, NSPMS through its grant
making scheme is rather reinforcing the class situation by adding other forms
of capital to the landlords while the landless are progressively being excluded
from such capital accumulating programs