Growth poles are simultaneous, coordinated investments in many sectors, like agriculture in the present case, to support self-sustaining industrialization in a country. These are to function as centres and drivers of agricultural and rural development. The current food insecurity experienced in the country and the high poverty rates among its rural inhabitants are primary concerns in this initiative (PNDES 2016–2020, 23).Ī key aspect of the National Development Plan is the promotion of so-called agricultural growth poles. For example, the National Economic and Societal Development Plan outlines the country’s agricultural potential and focuses on unexploited land and better use of human resources (PNDES 2016-2020). Footnote 1 To aid and eventually transform this occupational dependency, the government of Burkina Faso has launched a number of policy initiatives. While cash crops such as cotton, cashews and mangos (OEC Citation2017) are traded on global markets, the vast majority of farmers produces staple crops such as millet, maize, sorghum, and rice for their own consumption. Current statistics and projections emphasize the continuous importance of the rural sector to secure livelihoods: 80% of the country’s population are primarily engaged in the agricultural sector, which accounts for roughly one third of Burkina Faso’s gross domestic product (FAO Citation2014). Promoting agricultural development to improve food security, reducing poverty and eventually rendering Burkina Faso competitive on selected global food markets is high on the political agenda of the West African country (e.g. This allows understanding the rice market described as an ongoing and grounded process within a global systemic configuration. Concretely, the paper achieves this by bringing into dialogue the telecoupling literature concerned with the globalization of land-use change and the geographies of marketization literature focusing on market-making practices. A major point of the paper is to illustrate that combining systemic and processual theoretical perspectives is highly illuminating in this respect. Focusing on the Bagré Growth Pole Project, we describe how particular configurations of local, national and global connections and disconnections around the creation of a Burkinabe rice market are brought into being. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso the paper sketches the historical, legal and socioeconomic conditions, challenges and practices behind the increasing rice production. This paper traces this development and illustrates that rice production in Burkina Faso is the outcome of interrelated global and local processes. Since the 1970s the government of Burkina Faso together with international donor organizations has pushed for increasing national rice production to cope with the country’s food import dependency.
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