Abstract
This paper is a segment of a larger study on landlessness, livelihoods, and youth. It begins on the note that youth unemployment is a global crisis and that land holds hope as a pathway to employment creation through agriculture. Notwithstanding the sector’s potential, a common orthodoxy associates young people with apathy ‘in this field of work’, due to their perception of farming as antiquated, unprofitable and ‘not seen as a business’. While this paper seeks to explain what accounts for young people’s half-hearted attitude towards farming in the Zuarungu area, it argues that the commodification of land leads to competition among the rich upper class, which, combined with unceasing increases in population, results in land fragmentation at family and individual levels. Consequently, some compounds and individuals are stripped of land holdings, particularly arable lands, thus rendering them landless. This may be a critical factor in determining youth interest in land, generally, and farming, in particular. This paper contributes to existing research on the subject of the youth snubbing agriculture and contends that blanket explanations for youth disinterest in agriculture cannot suffice for all areas, even in a given country.
