| Summary: | Context and background
With many physical and human potentials, the Bamun country in the western highlands of Cameroon, which is an agricultural area excellence is today experiencing serious socio-economic and spatial transformations. The coffee crises, growth in cash crop production and demographic pressure within the former agricultural spaces has favored the movement of producers towards pioneer fronts. The availability of land capital in these new agricultural spaces attracts migrants from other horizons. These new agricultural spaces are gradually becoming cosmopolitan where the indigenous populations, made up of bamuns and tikars, relatively accept the arrival and installation of new migrants. Thus, arrived the migrants settle by buying from the natives especially from the village chiefs a parcel to be put in exploitation and can thus profit from usufruct of the harvest. These plots to them ceded cannot be registered according to the procedures of the right modern. This new form of agricultural colonization of formerly sparsely populated today provokes the recurrence of a hint of identity with the resultant unceasing land conflicts.
Goal and Objectives:
This work has the aim to analyze the agricultural occupation of these pioneer spaces and the land tenure insecurity that results.
Methodology:
This study is first based on field surveys carried out with rural producers, then documentary research in libraries and private or public development institutions and finally partipant observations with a set of actors.
Results:
As results, the migration of new producers to the pioneer fronts and the resulting strong competition for land generate conflicts between indigenous and non -indigenous people for control of land resources. There is a certain inequality between native and new migrants in access to land in the pioneer fonts of the bamun kingdom. The indigenous populations show a lack of love towards migrants who want to secure their land holding. This surge of identity withdrawal is detrimental for any agricultural development in the reception areas. These different land conflicts undoubtedly have socio-economic consequences on agricultural production activities and on social cohesion between the different rural communities.
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