In Sierra Leone, the marginalization of the agriculture is inherent to the economic, social and political crisis that embroiled the country into a tragic civil war between 1991 and 2001. While, at the national scale, the agricultural sector still represents the larger part of the workforce, the food production has declined since the 1970s. Massive low cost rice imports, fuelled by the development of the diamond industry, have devalued the work of the national producers. Such marginalization continues with the recent emergence of agro-industrial units financed by international capitals. At the regional scale, the crisis of the peasant agriculture has followed a specific trajectory. The diversity of the landscape mosaic reflects the profound changes that affected the farming systems. Local farmers combine the historical slash and burn farming with swamp rice cropping, mounds cropping in savannah and tree plantations. Even if population pressure has impacted these dynamics, it is the commodification of social relations that was the decisive trend. The large domestic groups, structured by lineages, have broken up. Nowadays the labor exchanges between producers explain significant economic disparities. However, under unfavorable economic integration conditions, labor productivity has stagnated or even declined. Then, the persistence of social relations of precedence, including child fosterage as a form of accumulation, restricts the scope of the differentiation processes within the peasantry.
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