Division and Exclusion: The Roots and Reframings of the Food/Cash Crop Distinction in Policy Discourse on African Agriculture

The distinction between “food crops” and “cash crops” is one of the most long-lived and widely used framings in policy discourse on African agriculture. This, we argue, is problematic seeing that the dis-tinction is not only analytically imprecise, but also deeply normatively charged, and potential-ly materially harmful to agricultural communities in African contexts. Departing from the existing lit-erature, we neither use the food/cash crop distinction uncritically nor merely criticise its exclusionary effects, but rather interrogate its historical genesis and usage in policy discourse over time. Based on archival research, we examine the origins and reframings of the distinction in policy discourse in Afri-can countries, primarily former British colonies, from the 1880s to the 2020s. Specifically, we trace the racialised colonial genesis of the distinction to the turn of the 19th century, and uncover later shifts in the mobilisation of the distinction; first, its reframing through modernist and developmental dis-course on African agriculture in the late colonial and early postcolonial period, and second, its re-emphasis with the rise of the climate change adaptation agenda since the 2010s. Understanding the co-lonial, developmental and, most recently, the planetary imperatives undergirding the usage of the food/cash crop distinction is not only key to understanding the historical roots and discursive logics of this long-lived distinction itself. It also highlights how discourse on African agriculture may negatively affect smallholder communities’ access to land, economic participation, industrialisation, and freedom of choice.