Interviewing the cotton producers, I was first able to reconstitute their specific economic strategies, and the constraints they depended on (the workforce available in the household, the access to cash, to land, the position in the local hierarchy – which is itself shaped by cotton production – and ecological datas). Thus it became possible to understand that cotton production is a very peculiar combination: it is made of the articulation between the peasant mode of production, its type of rationality and constraints, and the industrial standards of the textile industry, embodied by the SODECOTON field employees. From the situation derived economic advantages for the industry, able to extract a large quantity of free labor from the domestic communities engaged in the production via the contractualized peasant, as well as to transfer all the risks linked to the production on them. But the articulation also determine a far wider capacity of self determination for the initial producers, who work on the own field and live in their own village. This challenge to the control capacity of the SODECOTON was at least partially resolved by mechanisms of indirect discharge, through which large responsibilities were transmitted to a fraction of co-opted peasants. This process of “professionalization” was thus also a way to give to the strict discipline necessary to industrial cotton production a face of intimacy, using the local forms of legitimacy.