Social Differentiation and Household Dynamics Associated with Early Season Shea Nut Collection and Trading in Burkina Faso

Abstract

Originally a domestic product used by West African rural population, shea nut has become an international commodity exported all over the world. However, local periodic markets remain a central site of exchange and nut trading for many women shea nut collectors in Burkina Faso. Using survey data from Burkina Faso, this paper explores the ways in which shea nut collectors navigate shea nut trading. Many collectors engage in early nut trading during the farming season to cover their household subsistence needs, despite the lower shea nut price at that time of the year. The results show that this early market consists mostly of better off shea nut collectors buying nuts from worse off collectors, as the lead firms and wholesalers tend to enter the market later in the season. While the exchanged volumes remain small, this highlights social differentiation among women shea nut collectors, as the better-off collectors are able to invest their shea income in other sources of income, while the other collectors rely on shea for their reproduction needs. Furthermore, this social differentiation is also reflected in different household dynamics and bargaining strategies between spouses, as better-off collectors tend to collaborate to a larger extent with their partners than the other collectors.

Keywords:

• social differentiation
• commodity
• shea (Vitellaria paradoxa)
• bargaining
• Burkina Faso
• early trading
• gender dynamics

Acknowledgements

I am very thankful to my research partners in Burkina Faso who made this work possible: Fatimata Ilboudo, Christiane Conseibo, Casimir Ouedraogo, Alimata Diarra, Mustapha Traore and Ouarassitratou Ziba. I am also grateful for the feedback received from my supervisors Mariève Pouliot and Christian Lund, together with the helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since almost all respondents claim to use their farming outputs for both domestic and commercial use, farming activities are considered an investment, even though the scale of the investment depends from one household to the other, depending on the portion of the outputs they are able to sell.

2 Lead firms and wholesalers traditionally enter the market later in the year, when the volumes of available nuts are larger and the level of humidity of the nuts is lower. A few actors represent the bulk of the export nut trade, such as AAK (Sweden), Bunge Loders Croklaan (part of Bunge Limited, USA), 3F Industries (India), or Fuji Oil (Japan).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Innovationsfonden: [Grant Number 9067-00030B].

Notes on contributors

François Questiaux

François Questiaux is political ecologist, focusing on social dynamics within marginalized groups, including questions of social differentiation and exploitation, access to resources and tensions between wider global structures and subjective experiences in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso.