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Contract farming schemes have recently been portrayed by global development agencies as an alternative to 'land grabs', promoting processes of inclusive development through the integration of smallholders within global agro-industrial production complexes. The paper takes issue with such argument, using the case-study of contract farming scheme at Kakira Sugar Works in Uganda as empirical terrain for this investigation. It argues that despite contract farming schemes at first sight appear not to generate dispossession or displacement, they lead to forms of expulsion and/or marginalization of poor smallholders from sugar agro-poles through social differentiation. It also maintains that rather than being the antithesis to land enclosures, contract farming represents one instance of global neoliberal agricultural restructuring, functional to the expansion of the sugar frontier at cheap costs. This process, which I term sugarification, involves the maximization of value extraction from farmers, its appropriation by agribusiness and finance capital, and a regime of production which devaluates labour (wage and family) and nature, while dramatically affecting existing livelihoods and landscapes.

The politics of global energy are subject to increasing academic interest. Most work on energy politics focuses on oil, based upon a normative vision of a global energy modernity of fossil fuels and a transition to renewables. In most African countries, however, the primary source of energy is not oil, but woodfuel. Charcoal is of particular importance due to its centrality to urbanization: charcoal is the primary energy source for up to 80% of urban Africa, and its consumption is expected to continue increasing with expanding urbanization. Despite this centrality, the politics of charcoal remain largely unexplored. This article explores how political power shapes charcoal production and how charcoal as an energy source shapes political power through an in-depth study of charcoal extraction in northern Uganda. It argues that charcoal production, and its particular destructiveness, should be understood as a continuation of the violence of the 1986-2006 war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government. Based on several months of fieldwork in Northern Uganda, the article draws a distinction between the politics of small-scale household production and of large-scale industrial production. By focusing on the political violence of industrial charcoal production, we argue that orthodox academic and policy narratives about the charcoal industry in Africa can be qualified, and new questions can be raised concerning broader narratives of energy modernity and global energy politics.

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