Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of abbreviations and acronyms
- Glossary
- Map
- Introduction
- 1 The reconfiguration of the interventionist state after independence
- 2 Demiurge ascending: high modernism and the making of Mozambique
- 3 State sector erosion and the turn to the market
- 4 A privatizing state or a statist privatization?
- 5 Continuities and discontinuities in manufacturing
- 6 Capital and countryside after structural adjustment
- 7 The end of Marx and the beginning of the market? Rhetorical efforts to legitimate transformative preservation
- Bibliography
- Index
- OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES
6 - Capital and countryside after structural adjustment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of abbreviations and acronyms
- Glossary
- Map
- Introduction
- 1 The reconfiguration of the interventionist state after independence
- 2 Demiurge ascending: high modernism and the making of Mozambique
- 3 State sector erosion and the turn to the market
- 4 A privatizing state or a statist privatization?
- 5 Continuities and discontinuities in manufacturing
- 6 Capital and countryside after structural adjustment
- 7 The end of Marx and the beginning of the market? Rhetorical efforts to legitimate transformative preservation
- Bibliography
- Index
- OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES
Summary
Privatization and liberalization in agriculture and agro-processing have been protracted and highly contentious. Investors express frustration at the numerous barriers that confront them once they are outside of the capital, larger cities, and towns. As state planners discovered just after independence, poor infrastructure and communications can lead to critical delays in the supply of necessary inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, and equally can thwart the timely export of cotton or maize. Poor or inadequate governmental presence in the provinces can stall the completion of the necessary paperwork for exports and imports and force company managers to travel to Maputo, thus increasing the cost of doing business. Conflicts with other companies or with rural inhabitants over land, prices, or output may languish for years in overstretched local tribunals, or may be resolved by the local application of the “might is right” doctrine.
Yet it is in many of the more remote provinces that one finds Mozambique's prime agricultural areas. Nampula and Zambezia in the north are responsible for producing some of Mozambique's major exports, including cotton, cashews, sugar, tea, and copra, and for supplying the domestic food market with maize, rice, peanuts, beans, and fruit. To those investors willing to bear the risks, the possible returns on their investments can be substantial. Agricultural output has been growing steadily since the peace accords in 1992 and demand for cashews, maize, and sugar is high.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Transforming MozambiqueThe Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000, pp. 207 - 235Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002