Rice Margins Under Climate Change: Labour and Knowledge in Mangrove Rice Networks in Guinea-Bissau

INTRODUCTION: RICE CENTRALITY UNDER CONTESTATION

The centrality of rice to the social, political, economic and religious realities of coastal peoples in West Africa has been described in studies carried out in the homelands of the Diola, Baga and Balanta in modern Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea (Bivar and Temudo, 2014; Davidson, 2015; Linares, 1981; Ribeiro, 1989).1 One of the most productive rice farming systems in these coastal regions is on the inland side of mangrove forests, where swathes of mangrove swamps are cleared and converted into rice paddies. The establishment and maintenance of these mangrove rice paddies requires specific skills and knowledge and considerable labour to ensure effective water management through a system of dikes, ditches and sluices. These site-specific technological arrangements protect the development of rice plants from the unrelenting rhythms and the highest amplitudes of the estuarine tides and from the potentially devastating effects of rainwater flooding.

In most of these coastal communities, however, the centrality of rice has become subject to increasingly precarious conditions. Volatile political, economic and environmental conditions have combined to undermine both the sturdiness and stability of the water management infrastructure on which mangrove rice production depends and the social and communal structures necessary to build and maintain them. Countless villages have seen their mangrove rice production suspended, interrupted or only rudimentarily maintained.

In an ethnographic study among the Diola people in the village of Ensana, located in Suzana, Cacheu region in northern Guinea-Bissau, Joanna Davidson (2015) explains how rice — the sacred and totalizing element of life — has become a less and less viable crop. The online documentary ‘Zé Wants to Know Why’ (Divergente, 2015) highlights how climate change is affecting life in Elalab, another village in the same region, particularly the increasingly challenging task of preventing seawater from flooding rice fields. The village of Jobel,2 in the homeland of the Diola people, is facing displacement due to seawater flooding, a reality studied by Santos and Mourato (2022), Temudo and Cabral (2021) and Temudo et al. (2022). There seems to be a consensus among these authors that the effects of climate change are exacerbating long-standing tensions between Jobel and other villages. Also, in north-west Guinea-Conakry, Ramon Sarró (2021) describes major transformations of social life, agriculture and landscapes in the homeland of the Baga, where people are known for their deep-rooted mangrove rice farming skills and knowledge (Fields-Black, 2008). Near the city of Kamsar, lifeworlds based on mangrove rice are imperilled by more frequent seawater flooding (Sarró, 2021).

These peoples, who have based their livelihoods, social lives and worldviews on mangrove rice and who live in what were once called ‘rice societies’ (Davidson, 2015), are being pushed toward uncertain futures. Hawthorne's (2017: 499) review of Joanna Davidson's Sacred Rice (2015) poses the question: ‘Is there something unique about the present period? Or has life in the marshy lowlands of Guinea-Bissau long presented anxiety-laden challenges?’. Different narratives, memories and imaginaries remain in contestation when attempting to understand the extent to which climate change is leading to the disintegration of mangrove rice production as a mode of life.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2023: 1), notes that, ‘Relative sea level has increased at a higher rate than global mean sea level around Africa over the last three decades’. Guinea-Bissau, in particular, has a high coastal vulnerability index (Dada et al., 2024). The uneven distribution of rainfall and fast accumulation of rainwater runoff (Garbanzo et al., 2024; Mendes and Fragoso, 2024) add further challenges to the stability of dikes and other dam structures that protect the rice fields. Despite these challenges, in most regions of Guinea-Bissau, rainfall remains suitable for mangrove rice production,3 and hope lies in the fact that mangrove-based production of rice has been historically threatened by flooding, necessitating a long-standing tradition of constant adaptation. Efforts to protect rice fields from the spring tides appear throughout the historical record. For example, de Almada (1961: 36) notes that burst dikes were described in one of the first written accounts of the West African coast in the 16th century: ‘[they] make their rice fields in those lalas [savannah-dominated floodplains], and make ditches of earth because of the river that might come, even though the river often breaks them and floods the fields’. During the late colonial period, Espírito Santo (1949: 198) said that in Tombali, farmers ‘take care of ploughing of the soil, defending it with immense energy against, on the one hand, the rage of the tides, and on the other, the excess of pluvial water’. Rodney (1970: 17) mentions the ‘small canoes used by the Diolas to traverse their flooded rice fields’ in an early portrayal of the considerably flooded landscape in the Cacheu region. Burst dikes were also reported in the 1980s and 1990s by Gonçalves (1998) and Vieira (1989). The risk of flooding is inherent to the mangrove rice system, and one wonders what environmental and socio-economic conditions can ensure the reproduction of life in mangrove rice societies and for how long.

CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION AND THE LEGACY OF FOREIGN AID

The loss of land due to rising sea levels is and will continue to be harmful to the livelihoods that are connected to it. It has been broadly argued, including at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP27, that peoples and places identified as most vulnerable to rising sea levels have not significantly contributed to the fossil fuel emissions leading to global warming (Pflieger, 2023; Roberts, 2001). Rather, they have been integrated in the economies of capital accumulation, which benefit from the energy extracted from burning fossil fuels, as sources of labour and resource extraction. Additionally, several other historical and colonial layers of social injustices, as described below, are relevant to the case of Guinea-Bissau.

If it is true that the Loss and Damage Fund has the potential to address problems derived from climate change in countries like Guinea-Bissau, it is also important to recognize that its operationalization will depend on existing structures and practices developed by previous international programmes that have been identified as priorities in development (for example, biodiversity conservation, education, healthcare). In particular, the context of foreign aid after the 1990s is highly influential to the management of current and future climate change adaptation programmes. If the goal is to compensate or repair livelihoods destroyed by the effects of global warming, it does not seem logical or reasonable to accept the Loss and Damage Fund, or any other funding mechanism advertised as a climate change adaptation, without considering the literature on the effects of the so-called foreign aid on the lives of rural peoples in recipient countries.

A study by Herzer and Nunnenkamp (2012: 254) focusing on the effects of foreign aid in 21 countries from 1970 to 1995 points out that programmes intended to improve the quality of life of impoverished people not only failed to achieve their objectives but even reproduced and expanded inequality. From the 1980s, an emphasis on community participation was used to consolidate the legitimacy of development programmes in Africa, Asia and Latin and South America. Many NGOs were created under this umbrella and promoted as an alternative to the failed top-down approaches to development. However, by the mid-2000s, substantial literature had already been established (e.g. Hearn, 2007) showing how approaches to development continued to be dominated by donor models and were largely top-down, agenda-driven and expert-led. In addition, community participation had become ritualistic (e.g. Flint and Natrup, 2014) and instrumentalized (e.g. Pfeiffer, 2005; White, 2010).

In Guinea-Bissau, the foundation of village committees in rural areas during the struggle for independence (1963–74) was envisioned by Amílcar Lopes Cabral, founder and secretary-general of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde or PAIGC), who helped lead Guinea-Bissau to independence as a means to enable peasants to participate directly in the making of national political decisions (Washington, 1980). However, after independence village committees began occupying increasingly peripheral roles (if any) in the decision-making processes emerging from development agendas. Voices, agency and organization of rural peoples in development processes were replaced by non-governmental intermediaries that supposedly would be able to represent them. Earlier works by Galli (1990), Sousa et al. (2017) and Temudo (2012, 2015) have shown the limited, or even negative, effects of development and conservation programmes on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers.

Environmental-driven programmes, in particular, have been described as undermining local political authorities and contributing to the alienation of land essential to the reproduction of peasant modes of life. Except for a few examples in which farmers had direct access to funding (e.g. Sousa et al., 2021), NGOs and the state have been accused by farmers of using farmer associations as structures to capture funds for development projects with limited benefit to their lives (Temudo, 2015). In Senegal, Hiraldo and Böhm (2023) show how the implementation of policies aimed to mitigate the effects of climate change have worsened the already vulnerable situation of local peoples.4 Effective responses to climate injustice must address the roots of social injustice, otherwise policies directed at responding to the climate crisis will further entrench gendered, race- and class-based historical and contemporary inequalities. As noted by Borras and Franco (2018: 1320), ‘agrarian justice and climate justice have become dialectically linked: one cannot exist without the other’ and, in the face of climate disruption, peasant modes of life must be protected to ensure food sovereignty.

INDIGENOUS AGRICULTURAL KNOWLEDGE AND CLIMATE JUSTICE

Climate justice has been unpacked into several dimensions, one of which is recognition justice, which corresponds to the recognition of the knowledge, identities and values of rural and Indigenous peoples (Jones et al., 2024). Without this epistemic recognition it is not realistic that rural peoples can benefit from compensation programmes such as the Loss and Damage Fund mentioned above. Together with relational, procedural, distributive and restorative justice (see, for example, Jones et al., 2024; Parsons et al., 2021), recognition justice involves the consideration of different forms of governance. In the context of mangrove rice farming in Guinea-Bissau, the construction of water management infrastructure is immersed in local cosmopolitics and in the social organization enabling the (re)production of knowledge along lines of kinship, age and inter-village relations. In other words, processes of knowing coastal ecologies, acting upon them and organizing social life around them provide the basis for water governance, meaning that knowledge, ecologies and governance are indissociable. In fact, the importance of Indigenous agricultural knowledge in water management for climate change adaptation has been described for contexts such as Iran (Ghorbani et al., 2021), India (Laishram et al., 2020), Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan (Rivera-Ferre et al., 2021), among others. A recent study documented the importance of Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge to water management adaptation to climate change across Africa, although only 10.4 per cent of the African governments included Indigenous and local knowledge in their adaptation planning (Zvobgo et al., 2022).

Even if Indigenous knowledge systems and governance are recognized as meaningful to address ecological crises (Ratima et al., 2019), it is argued that epistemic recognition alone fails, and can even serve to maintain dispossession, if hierarchies and structures of power remain untouched (Coulthard, 2014). Considering this critique, together with a focus on knowledge, our analysis also discusses how processes of knowledge production and circulation can benefit from a change in the access of rural peoples to climate adaptation funding.

The research questions we address in this article include the following. How do different local histories of rice production contribute to the recovery of production regionally? How do knowledge and labour circulate regionally in processes leading to the recovery of mangrove rice farming? Why is the way knowledge circulates important for an effective use of external funds in the recovery of mangrove rice production under climate change? These questions will be explored by mapping the connections that allow for the circulation of knowledge and labour among villages in a multi-sited ethnography in southern Guinea-Bissau.

The article is structured as follows. The next sections explain the methodology and fieldwork and briefly describe the history of rice abandonment and rice persistence in the Tombali region in southern Guinea-Bissau. The article presents a multi-sited ethnography which focuses on the pre-existing and emerging connections among villages and which provides grounds for the rehabilitation of rice fields today. The article concludes with specific policy recommendations. These will be presented in detail below; in brief, we argue that: (1) rice production is linked to regional networks established among villages and cannot be understood as a sum of unconnected places; (2) places of marginal and/or interrupted rice production are intermittently part of the network and important for technological experimentation under climate change; (3) adaptation must be recognized as a long-standing process based on individual and collective learning where both successful and unsuccessful rice technology recovery attempts play important roles; and (4) funding efficiency can be established by providing direct access to funds and/or access to goods and services that allow for local responses to specific micro-environments and the social conditions of different villages and rice fields. Overall, this article contributes to the body of literature discussing the ways in which climate change adaptation interventions can be rooted in redistributive logics rather than in strategies that reinforce or create new vulnerabilities (Eriksen et al., 2021; Taylor, 2015).

METHODOLOGY AND FIELDWORK: FOLLOWING RICE CONNECTEDNESS

The empirical work presented in this article can be described as an ethnography of village-based connections in Cubucaré (Tombali region), homeland to the Nalu people, in southern Guinea-Bissau. We have followed connections established by kinship, reciprocity and labour contracts that are relevant to the circulation of mangrove rice knowledge and technology. Using the village of Caequene as a base, we engaged in multi-sited ethnography built from the connections identified between different micro-geographies of mangrove rice farming.

To explain how this multi-sited ethnography emerged, it is important to present succinctly how labour and work are organized in the region. At the scale of the moransa (patrilineal lineages that may include several houses — house is patrilocal), women and men perform tasks based on gender (Frazão-Moreira, 2009). A moransa includes different fugon, which has been described as the basic economic unit of production (Frazão-Moreira, 2009; Oliveira et al., 1993),5 grouping together people who share production commitments and benefit from common harvests. To maintain the workforce, elders may prevent young people from funding their own fugon to prevent labour scarcity (Frazão-Moreira, 2009).

At the village level, agricultural working groups are often organized by households or by age and gender. These working groups may labour collectively on a reciprocal rotating schedule or they may perform daily-wage activities for specific households (including in other villages). The monetization of labour, especially of young people's labour, together with urban migration have been described as affecting the labour available for mangrove rice farming (Bivar and Temudo, 2014; Infande, 2023) and attempts to reproduce mangrove rice farming have become heavily dependent on the motivations of young people. Youth work groups of one village can be hired to work in another village, which is another context that allows for inter-village knowledge sharing.

Land tenure in the region, including of mangrove rice fields, is patrilineal. In cases of long-term abandonment of rice fields, the mangrove regrows. If swamps are reactivated for rice production, the mangrove must be cut again and land rights are renegotiated. Previous land tenure is considered, but the division of land is updated to the new situation. This rearrangement is done according to the labour that contributed to the construction of the main dike — central to the reactivation of mangrove rice production by enabling the control of salinity inside the future rice fields. People participating in the construction of the main dike and representing their own fugon have access to rice parcels in the newly created rice fields. When land tenure is settled and the productive phase begins, plots to grow rice can be borrowed if the owners do not plan to use them all. Although largely patriarchal in terms of land tenure and access, matrilineality is also socially recognized as important for rituals, redistribution of harvests, childhood education (Frazão-Moreira, 2009) and labour distribution (a person can be asked to visit their maternal uncle in his village to help with agricultural work). These inter-village and family-based engagements around agricultural work are important to knowledge transmission.

Both local and regional networks through which knowledge is created and transmitted contribute to the similarities and diversity observed in rice technology along the coast of Guinea-Bissau and beyond.6 For example, it has been referenced in the literature that mangrove rice cultivation in the Nalu homeland resulted from the migration of Balanta people to the south of Guinea-Bissau (Frazão-Moreira, 2009) in the 1920s (Carvalho, 1949).7 Some scholars also attribute the earlier influence of the Baga peoples from northern Guinea-Conakry to the development of swamp rice in Tombali by the Nalu people (Sousa, 2017).8 The idea of micro-scale connectedness is key to this article and emerged from our shared experiences with local rice farming histories in Cubucaré.

Our team consisted of two researchers (the corresponding author and third author) and a mangrove rice farmer (second author). The work presented here resulted from a shared ethnography of rice production during which we documented efforts to rehabilitate mangrove rice production in several villages in Cubucaré. It is impossible to provide detail about the methodology of this work without providing an explanation about the long-term relationship of work and friendship. From 2009 to 2011, during the fieldwork for Joana Sousa's PhD dissertation, co-author Ansumane Braima Dabó was her field assistant, who quickly became a friend and a colleague with whom observations were discussed and perspectives shared. Together they measured crop damage in the village of Caequene (the central village in this article), including in mangrove rice fields, and Dabó helped with establishing contacts with key informants in neighbouring villages and acted as a translator whenever needed. Caequene was Sousa's base and even if she also worked in other villages, she would come back to Caequene to rest and organize field notes. Sousa was hosted by the fugon of Dabo's family. Major life events were shared between the authors, including Dabo's marriage, the visit of Sousa's family, hosted by Dabo and his family, and other episodes of care during times of recovery from disease or accidents. They worked together from 2009 to 2011 and in 2013, 2015 and 2019. In 2013, the three authors of this article combined their efforts during the construction of the main dike in Caequene and Ana Luisa Luz coordinated the production of a collaborative film on the construction during five months (Luz et al., 2015). Finally, in 2016–18, Sousa lived and worked as a university teacher in Bissau, during which time Dabo spent a few months at her house in Bissau. His stays allowed them (together with Luz) to co-write research outputs and allowed him to present the work at universities in Bissau.

In sum, since 2009, we have carried out different activities together, such as conducting fieldwork, showing the documentary film and collaborating at the university. These experiences have allowed us to share perspectives, complicating and adding nuance to the individual analyses and therefore creating a co-produced understanding of reality. During this process we became colleagues in research. Dabo has been a master of osprindadi (the Guinean Kriol for hosting) in Caequene. He patiently translated parts of his world, surrendered to the concerns and challenges of otherness, and became an experienced interlocutor of worlds.

In the writing of texts, the first and third authors of this article received Dabo as their ospri (guest), helping him to decode and demystify the language and meaning of academic publications relevant to their shared interests, and invited him to communicate his experience, knowledge and perspectives through writing and video. We believe that these life-methodologies can contribute to different forms of dialogue and collaboration that are important for social, ecological and political positioning and co-learning in the face of global warming and climate change. A version of this manuscript was first written in Portuguese so that all three team members could contribute to it, and discussions about the content of the article were held in Guinean Kriol. More recently, we have depended on email and social media during the revision process. A final version in Portuguese was also shared and revisions were incorporated.

The empirical work that speaks directly to this article began in the Nalu village of Caequene (see Figure 1) in 2017 and 2019. We mapped the relationships established with other villages that allowed for the circulation of labour and knowledge in the context of rice farming, especially in Cadique Yala, Catchamba, Farim and Madina, as well as other cases that we followed less closely. We carried out semi-structured interviews with farmers, both old and young, and in-depth interviews with farmers recognized as having advanced knowledge of mangrove rice farming and we held many informal conversations with farmers while walking through the mangroves and rice fields, which produced a shared narration of the space (Lee and Ingold, 2006). Participant observation was carried out on working days and during the seasonal and daily life routines in rice agriculture, which proffered access to details of practice that evoked deeper histories and knowledge.

The direction of the interviews was largely determined by the interviewees, although core topics included technological history (for example, dikes, ditches, seeds), types of knowledge (for example, topography, hydraulics, oceanography), diffusion of knowledge (for example, lineages, extended family, age groups, gender), local history of mangrove rice cultivation and concerns about the future. Information was triangulated while interviewing multiple people in connected villages — especially in Caequene, Catchamba Nalu, Farim (all home to Nalu peoples), and Cadique Yala (village inhabited by Balanta people, details will be presented below).

As described above, agricultural tasks and the activities that sustain livelihoods in Cubucaré are gendered, and women and men are responsible for different realms of rice (re)production. The focus of this article is on the knowledge and practices required to instal water management infrastructure such as constructing and/or repairing dikes, digging out or closing canals and installing sluices. These activities are all performed by men. Women assist directly in the closing of canals and participate in the other tasks by providing cooked food and water to drink. Yet the site preparation tasks mainly belong to the masculine dimension of mangrove rice farming. For example, men's knowledge is directed at predicting spring tides, techniques for damming sea canals, topography and the architecture of water systems, among others. Men's labour is directed at the wielding of flat-bladed shovels to prepare fields for planting or using tools like machetes and axes and infrastructure items such as hollowed tree trunks or polyvinyl tubes used for drainage, or sticks of different shapes and sizes to provide structure for the dikes at the sites where seawater canals have been dammed. Consequently, this article is largely the result of an analysis of men's perspectives about mangrove rice farming technology and its transformations. There are limitations to not considering women's perspectives of technology such as their ideas about the interruption and re-emergence of rice production, and the advanced knowledge they hold about seedbeds and transplanting, rice varieties, rice transportation, processing and cooking.9 Similarly, the perspectives of children, who are largely responsible for guarding the rice fields and fishing in rice polders, were also not considered here because these activities escape the focus of the article. Finally, the stories told in this document are open-ended stories (see Tsing, 2015) since the present is immersed in uncertainty.

We identified differences among villages in terms of their relative importance as repositories of experience in rice farming, and from there we mapped the relationships established among them. An analysis of our fieldwork yielded two broad types of villages involved in mangrove rice production: ‘rice refugia’ and ‘rice margins’. A few villages, in many cases home to Balanta people (often not exclusively), have been refugia to rice knowledge and technology in times of crises. Some of these villages, like Bedanda, Cabedu, Caboxangue, Cadique Yala, Cafine and Darsalam, are regional centres of mangrove rice farming and places where mangrove rice has been cultivated despite the political, economic and climatic challenges of the 20th and 21st centuries (and where mangrove rice farming has not been interrupted in living memory).

During the colonial period, centres of rice production were recognized by the Portuguese colonial administration, which led to the installation of administration posts and/or storehouses in villages such as Bedanda, Cabedu, Caboxangue and Cafine, among other rice-producing villages. After independence, the first state office for agricultural research, the Caboxangue Experimental Station (Estação Experimental de Caboxangue), was established in 1977 in Caboxangue to develop and trial rice seed varieties.

Other villages constitute the margins of rice networks — they are on the periphery, but they serve as relevant connecting points among rice producing centres as this article demonstrates. These are often home to Nalu or Balanta communities and, less frequently, to Sosso or Mandinga communities. The phrase ‘rice margins’ describes places marked by interruptions in the production of mangrove rice. These include cases in which production has contracted, (almost) disappeared and then eventually emerged again. When active, rice production at the margins builds connectivity between villages and boosts vitality in the network as a whole by allowing labour and knowledge to circulate.

THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF RICE IN CUBUCARÉ

In the 20th century, rice played an important role in the political history of Guinea-Bissau. In fact, the effects of climate change on rice production compound the processes of vulnerabilization, brought about through the control and manipulation of rice production by the colonial administration, the bombing of rice fields by the colonial army, misappropriation of funds and public goods by state elites and the failure of development programmes to promote rice production after independence. This section describes transitions in rice subjectivity in the context of southern Guinea-Bissau, particularly on the Cubucaré peninsula.

In the years preceding the start of the Struggle for Independence (1963–74) and in the same period that PAIGC was founded in 1956, the Front for the Liberation of Guinea and Cape Verde (Frente de Libertação da Guiné e Cabo Verde or FLGCV) accused members of the Council of Government and Trade Chamber of the colonial state of manipulating rice prices and supply as a strategy for forcing farmers to increase production: ‘It is known that this year's harvests would have been enough to feed the people until the next harvest. All was exported to the metrópole and to other countries, and our own farmers are starving and working and suffering again in the rice fields’ (FLGCV, 1960: 1).

During the early 1970s, the colonial administration's control over the rice trade was challenging; it tried to force farmers to sell their rice to colonial enterprises such as Casa Gouveia and Sociedade Ultramarina (Galli, 1995). The FLGCV excerpt quoted above is from a 1960 document denouncing colonial rice exportation policies that resulted in a lack of rice for subsistence in rural areas. In this context, the colonial administration had imported rice and was selling it at 14.3 per cent above the price fixed by the state. The rice supply became so scarce that women had to queue at the doorsteps of storehouses to try to purchase rice and they were routinely subjected to abuse and exploitation in exchange for sustenance (FLGCV, 1960). From the 1930s until the mid-1950s rice was exported from Portuguese Guinea to Europe (Temudo and Abrantes, 2013) and, based on the quote above, then continued until 1960. The micro-history of rice in Guinea-Bissau during the colonial period and struggle for independence, and the social relations it mediated, are yet to be studied in detail.

Throughout the struggle for liberation, rice continued to play a role in the conflict between colonialists and PAIGC, via strategies of diverting or destroying rice production. In the early years of the fight for independence, before the region of Tombali was liberated, the PAIGC guerrilla leader Marga (the nom de guerre of João Bernardo Vieira10) wrote a letter to Aristides Pereira11 describing a military offensive by the colonial army targeting rice fields and stated: ‘These days the Portuguese troops have set fire to almost all the houses and to the rice in the bolanhas12 [rice fields] of the people’. In the same letter, he mentions that 90 tons of rice were intercepted from Casa Gouveia and should be en route to Conakry (Casa Comum, 1971). In regions such as the one where Marga was a commander, rice played an important role in sustaining life and enabling the continuation of the struggle; when destroyed by colonialists, the intention was to increase hardship and dispirit the people.

In 1971, in the liberated zone of Tombali, PAIGC organized rice evacuation brigades (Brigadas de Evacuação do Arroz) that were in charge of collecting rice from farmers and managing rice stocks (ibid.). In these liberated areas, particularly in Tombali, the rice produced could be exchanged for clothes, needles, sandals and soap. The exchange rates were ‘established by the central party leaders on the recommendation of the local cadres … in such a way that the people [were] encouraged to produce more’ (Rudebeck, 1972: 4). In 1971, a report on the region of Catió mentioned that there were no rice scarcity problems among the PAIGC fighters; on the contrary, the concerns were about damage to rice in storehouses (Casa Comum, 1971). At the same time, in Cubucaré and in other areas of Tombali, the report stated that: ‘The spring tides caused considerable damage’ (ibid.: 9) and that the following year ‘would be a difficult one’ (ibid.: 26). Yet, the report mentioned that there was a ‘reasonable participation of the masses in the work in rice fields and orchards’ and that committees will ‘mobilize all people interested in repairing the dikes’ (ibid.).

Independence was unilaterally declared in 1973;14 however, discontent grew in the decade that followed despite the country becoming an international example of a grassroots organization that achieved success with ‘the common determination to build a new non-exploitative society’ (Washington, 1980: 15). PAIGC had promised economic assistance for rural peoples, but ‘the government had moved to monopolize rural trade’ instead (Forrest, 1987: 102). Additionally, neglect of the basic infrastructure needed for peasant production and the concentration of public resources on imports represented clear continuities between the policies pursued by the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) and the post-independence PAIGC governance (Galli, 1987).

Furthermore, droughts experienced in the Sahel in 1977 and 1979 resulted in a decrease in rice production in the region. The 1980 coup led by Nino Vieira, which ended the Luis Cabral regime (1974–80), was called the ‘rice coup’ due to the ‘serious [rice] shortages not only in the capital but throughout the country’ (Galli, 1990: 56). In 1983, not long after the coup, the shortage of basic needs worsened and President Nino Vieira granted the armed forces the ‘privilege of receiving the initial distribution of all imported rice’ (Forrest, 1987: 109). In a sense, rice production ‘acted as a barometer of producer–state relations, especially in the first ten years of independence’ (Galli, 1990: 55), which until 1989–90 was marked by a substantial decrease.

From 1985, the period of economic adjustment funded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was also unable to improve rice production. On the contrary, the Structural Adjustment Programme encouraged non-productive rather than productive investment and did not bring the expected economic benefits to agricultural producers. According to Galli (1990: 58), ‘the major beneficiaries [of the funds] have been the members of the state class’. Moreover, as Galli (1990) notes, labour shortages, due to seasonal and permanent migration, further exacerbated the challenging conditions for rice production in the country.

In the 1990s, the advent of multi-party politics and the liberalization of the economy gave rise to a more complex political space, layered with private sector businesses, import–export actors, and national and international organizations acting in different fields. The increasing number of NGOs operating in the country began to build an interface with the rural peasantry which has been criticized ever since (Sousa et al., 2017; Temudo, 2015), including for failing to keep development promises, dismissing farmers’ calls for meetings and undermining traditional processes of decision making.

As a result, according to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics, rice imports increased in the country from 1986 to 2005 although these numbers cannot be separated from the promotion of cashew production.15 In 2013, a World Food Programme report (WFP, 2013) noted that 80 per cent of the households benefited from cashew sales, which were described as having discouraged rice production in the country (Temudo and Abrantes, 2013, 2014). The same report recognized the importance of reinvesting in mangrove rice farming and proposed the inclusion of Food for Work activities, ‘to assist vulnerable populations to rehabilitate rice production infrastructures’, and to promote food security in Guinea-Bissau (WFP, 2013: 7). Later, in 2017, the National Plan of Agricultural Investment gave some weight to the promotion of rice production and aimed to decrease the rice deficit by 50 per cent by 2025 and to produce a national net rice surplus by 2030 (FAO, 2017).

Evidence of abandoned rice fields has also been described by chronological land cover studies (Andrieu, 2018; Temudo and Cabral, 2017), and if trained eyes scan Google Earth images of Guinea-Bissau it is possible to discern the perpendicular lines of old dikes in regrown mangrove forests. Mangrove canopies hide untold stories of past rice production. While walking through the mangrove, among the webs of aerial roots and awash in the estuarine water that cyclically covers the muddy soil, glimpses of eroded ridges also reveal a past that lies latent in the mud. Rice rests in the memory of elders, but younger generations, the protagonists of rice re-emergence under climate change, are scavenging those memories and re-opening the mangrove swamps.

REPAIRS WITHOUT REPARATION

While the history of rice has been shaped by political, social and environmental volatility, the continued existence of mangrove rice production in Cubucaré, and in the Tombali region more broadly, demonstrates the capability of rice livelihoods to persist and even to re-emerge, despite the present challenges. In several villages in Cubucaré, such as Abedaia, Caequene, Cafal Balanta, Cafal Nalu, Cafatche, Cassintcha, Catchamba Nalu, Catomboi, Farim, Madina and Sogobol, rice production ceased or substantially decreased prior to 2013. However, during the period 2013–19, we observed farmers in these communities working to rehabilitate or expand their rice paddies. These villages constitute the ‘margins’ of rice production: they rely on diverse livelihood strategies, their mangrove rice production has been historically discontinuous and they have established connections with other villages — the rice refugia — to reinforce the means and knowledge needed to pursue plans of rice rehabilitation.

As explained above, rice refugia have effective social mechanisms for labour allocation, are repositories of advanced knowledge and have proven more resilient to extreme climatic events. For example, during the rainy season of 2015, several dikes were damaged by the compounding effects of spring tides and strong winds. In the Balanta rice refugium of Cafine, two farmers described how the front dike ruptured in more than 20 places.16 While these events impacted rice production, production never ceased. Another farmer in Cafine described how more than 270 people from the village participated in repairing the dike in 2016, the year after the storm.17 Labour and knowledge are redistributed from these rice refugia to other villages through agreements involving reciprocity, payment or access to land.

FUNDING THE MARGINS TO STRENGTHEN THE WHOLE

Concerns raised by Davidson (2015) and Hawthorne (2017) about the effects of climate in the disintegration of mangrove rice societies will probably be revisited several times in the future. If disintegration is understood as the breakdown of a whole into smaller parts, then this might lead to a situation in which rice production is reduced to a few rice refugia. A disjointed rice landscape might pave the way for more generalized disintegration of rice-producing systems. This disintegration can potentially be pre-empted by a reinvigoration of the cohesive forces of knowledge circulation.

CONCLUSION

Adaptation to environmental change and variation in mangrove rice farming in Guinea-Bissau learns from knowledge networks and regional collaboration. Climate-induced transformations threaten to fragment these networks, reducing rice production to isolated refugia. However, the exchange of labour, knowledge and technology across villages counters this disintegration. Rehabilitating rice margins reinforces networks and redistributive expertise and fosters the capacity to respond to climate change. Failure in these efforts is also valuable as it enables learning, experimentation and future preparedness. Development strategies must recognize these processes, emphasizing decentralized funding and local advanced knowledge. By strengthening the connectivity of mangrove rice landscapes through reciprocal relationships and experimental practices, the staple producing sector in Guinea-Bissau can better navigate the challenges of climate change. This approach also offers a model for redefining development as a bottom-up, adaptive and context-specific process of innovation and ongoing adaptation.

This discussion, grounded at the local level, benefits from thinking through the historical politics of colonialism, persisting forms of coloniality and climate change. On the one hand, there are grounds to frame the recovery of the infrastructure needed for mangrove rice production as historical reparations for Portuguese colonialism, particularly regarding the bombing of rice fields by the colonial army during the 11-year War of Independence. On the other hand, considering that rises in sea levels have been largely caused by the Global North, resulting in new and considerable damage to the economies and lives of coastal peoples in Guinea-Bissau and beyond, a cancellation of public debt, which has been evaluated by the IMF (2024) as 80.3 per cent of the country's GDP, is a means for achieving a sort of redistributive climate justice. These considerations suggest that there should be organization and representation of peasants around the defence of their rights in decisions that affect their modes of life, as well as having an urban population and decision makers who will listen to and accommodate rural perspectives.