The Rise of "plant & Share" Contracts in Côte D'ivoire. Incomplete Contracting and Land Conflicts.
Abstract: The paper tackles the broad issue of contract incompleteness, property rights and conflicts in the context of rural Côte d'Ivoire. Thru a "Plant & Share" contract, a landowner provides land to a farmer who develops a tree crop plantation. When the plantation starts to produce, three types of sharing arrangements occur, depending on what is shared: the plantation, the plantation and the land, or the production. P&S contracts remain usually informal (no legal validation of the transaction by a public authority) and are quite incomplete. Some elements of the arrangement are rarely or never specified explicitly: the length of the contract, the right to transfer the plantation, the technical process involved in the creation of the plantation. Sometimes it is not even explicitly clear if it is only the plantation, or the plantation and the land that will be shared. In their current form, these contracts therefore convey a real potential for conflicts between landowners and farmers. The aim of the paper will be to provide insights into the rationale for the rapid spread of this institutional arrangement. Its incompleteness will be discussed as well as its potentially conflictive features. More crucially, the paper will show how this contract, in spite of its incompleteness, constitutes an alternative to much more conflictive land "sales" that currently dominate the Ivorian land market. A discussion of the socio-political embeddedness of contractual practices will thus be provided.
