Frelimo and the politics of agricultural marketing in Mozambique

Abstract

The Frelimo government in Mozambique pinned its hopes for rapid and widespread socialist modernisation of the country upon the agricultural sector. During the two decades since independence, the precise role which the government wished the agricultural sector to fulfil has changed, and the changing regulation of agricultural marketing reflects the new priorities. The most important instrument devised by the government to deal with problems related to marketing was the state marketing board, Agricom. This paper seeks to show how state intervention through Agricom and through other instruments frequently had unintended effects which resulted in new dynamics and situations to which the government and other economic agents had to respond. Despite being under great pressure from the government in the first decade of independence, the private sector was able to exploit opportunities which appeared as a result of state intervention, whereas state attempts to centralise decision‐making had the perverse effect of weakening state capacity to intervene in the economy. In the meantime, the large‐scale influx of aid after the mid‐1980s had contradictory effects, both strengthening and weakening Agricom in its changing roles. The study of Agricom permits an analysis of a generalised problem in Mozambique, namely the contradictions between different levels of political accountability that undermine the state's real capacity for controlling even its own institutions. The different levels of political accountability, and the non‐accountability that resulted from the contradictions among them, created spaces for variously motivated interventions by numerous different agents, a feature that consistently worked against state objectives as defined in Maputo.