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    STUDIA SOCIOLOGIA - Issue no. 2 / 2014  
         
  Article:   NEW FORMS OF LAND ENCLOSURES: MULTINATIONALS AND STATE PRODUCTION OF TERRITORY IN CAMEROON.

Authors:  . 		 
       
         
  Abstract:  The 2008 financial crises led to a scramble for land and other natural resources reminiscent of colonialism by foreign governments and multinational corporations to feed their populations and pre-empt the eventuality of another food crises through large-scale agricultural investment. This paper discusses the creation of capitalist frontiers in the colonial agricultural enclaves of Cameroon’s Littoral region where three multinational plantation companies hold sway. It demonstrates how the coming into the country of foreign investors has transformed the meaning of land and led to contesting legal orders between customary and statutory land tenure, the transformation of man-nature relationship and the dispossession of local communities due to the developmentalist state’s production of territory. In the present neoliberal context, the state is increasingly controlling people and their relations to natural resources including land through the production of territory that is subsequently handed over to foreign investors. The paper adopts the view that the use of the expression ‘new enclosures’ is a misnomer because these developments are taking place at the very sites of the colonial frontier in Cameroon’s Littoral region. It calls attention to the need for land governance reforms so as to restitute local land rights and for the need to respect internationally recognized environmental standards by multinational corporations.

Keywords: frontier, agricultural development, production of territory, communal land rights, land governance, developmentalism 		 
         
     
         
         
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