Recontexualizing Contract Farming In Central Mozambique

The question of whether or not contract farming(CF)can be an alternative pathway for agricultural commercialization in Africa has been discussed widely,particularly after the world-wide large-scale land acquisitions(LSLA)of 2008/9.This research attempts to reposition the discussions into local settings by illustrating context-specific pictures of external interventions including that of CF and LSLA,in a case of soybean CF in Gurúè,Zambézia province,which experienced the introduction of projects by USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in cooperation with various organizations.Using the case,the study challenges two major presumptions made by previous studies:(1)that CF can be understood only in a polarized term,as an agricultural model that is either inclusive or exploitative(2)that Sub-Saharan smallholders must be somewhat ambiguously viewed as being passive receivers of aid who need to be helped out of poverty.Although more recent studies have placed greater focus on diverse pictures,mainstream literature from TCE framework often adopt unrealistic representations of CF and smallholders.By contrast,this research works to overcome the limitations of previous studies of CF by focusing on context-specific pictures.For this reason,two villages within the area being focused on in this project,Lioma and Ruace,were purposefully selected in order to represent different social and historical contexts typical in the region.Lioma largely maintains the matrilineal inheritance rules,while the majority of households in Ruace are nuclear without specific inheritance rules.Even though both villages were in the area targeted by the CF project and received services,such as the provision of inputs,seeds,and extension services,the household interviews showed that Lioma had significantly smaller number of soybean producers compared to Ruace.This study,therefore,comparatively analyzes the two villages by means of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and intends to explore(i)The reasons that local people in Ruace were more active regarding their participation in CF than those in Lioma,and(ii)The reasons that local people in Ruace took an acquiescent stance toward oppressions by a CF company and incorporated LSLA into their livelihoods,whereas local people in Lioma resisted LSLA.Regarding quantitative analysis,the descriptive statistics are used to show the demographic differences at the intervillage level,and the difference between participants and non-participants at the intra-village level,and binary logit model to analyze factors affecting participation in soybean production and CF.One of the main results shows that the size of a household’s landholding influenced the attitude towards participation into soybean production in both villages and households with the larger a landholding are more likely to produce soybeans,though this tendency was more evident in Ruace than Lioma.The results given by the quantitative analysis are reconsidered by comparing them to the context-specific findings generated by the qualitative analysis.The findings based on fieldwork suggest that in Lioma,post-war experiences of rural revitalization,a self-supporting network based on matrilineal lineage,and overlapping roles of traditional and political authorities were a foundation for the resistance.In contrast,in Ruace,historically accumulated dependency on external interventions,social differentiation based on money-oriented capitalistic relations,and concentration of power on a local leader were a foundation of incorporation.The study documents different wartime and post-war experiences: many people in Lioma returned home and started their lives afresh on their own land,while Ruace welcomed migrants and external assistance periodically,which gave the local people a sense of confidence and dissatisfaction with their livelihoods,respectively.Furthermore,people in Lioma were maintaining a self-supporting network based on matrilineal lineage when it came to flexible land tenure and seasonal work-sharing.By contrast,in Ruace,the individualistic and money-oriented commonsense notion of “nothing is free” was widespread.Additionally,the overlapping roles of traditional and political authorities made it possible for residents of Lioma to take actions against oppressions by a CF company and LSLA,while the concentration of power on a local leader gave the residents of Ruace a sense of resignation and resulted in acquiescence and incorporation.In this way,this study challenges the assumption of their being smallholders as a general category as represented in presumption of previous studies,and rather suggests their being active and diverse actors who can influence the direction of external interventions.