Exploring a Symmetrical Relations and Diverse Processes of Enslavement in Nigeria’s Agricultural Sector

Agriculture in Nigeria has continued to be the backbone of the country economy as most of the labor force is employed in the sector and leading exports include cocoa, palm oil, cassava and groundnuts. However, it is also defined by a severe hierarchical pattern of structural inequalities that define labour relations and working conditions. This article is a thorough theoretical review of asymmetrical power relations and various processes of how enslavement-type labour conditions are produced and reproduced within the sector. Based on dependency theory, postcolonial political economy, unfree labour and modern slavery models and discussion of global value chain and state-elite relationships, the paper identifies how historical effects of colonialism, neoliberal integration of markets, debt-based coercion, lax regulatory enforcement and export production impede worker agency. The review reveals that the agrarian capitalism of debt bondage in sharecropping, dangerous child labour in both family and commercial farms, internal trafficking to migrant farm work, and conflict-induced forced labour are not mere peripheral anomalies, but inherently embedded within agrarian capitalist practices with the unequal power asymmetry of the global and the local and systems of a state complicity to place export revenues over labour norms. It proposes that these circumstances and contradictions are systematically incorporated in the peripheral export agriculture and cycled by institutional failures and elite capture. The article is relevant because modern slavery and agrarian labour governance have a history of debate, and its conceptualization of enslavement as a modern systemic process in legally existing industries has implications to the labour rights, rural and structural change in resource-dependent economies