There is a voluminous academic literature concerned with understanding the way in which African states act in rural societies. This article makes a contribution to this broad area of literature by looking at the way in which the state in Mozambique has intervened in, conditioned, or created trade between peasant farmers and other social agents. The contours of this interaction are complex, reflecting specific class relations, particular socio-cultural characteristics of peasant society, the environment, regional economic history and the nature of the state itself. The role of the state has been central to peasant marketing in Mozambique since the Second World War – first, to create markets which explicitly favoured Portuguese settlers, Portuguese national planning and the requirements of international capital, and subsequently as part of a broader reorganisation of rural markets articulated by Frelimo. What makes an analysis of the state's role in marketing particularly important is the political aspect of marketing: the state is an agency which needs to justify its actions with reference to a broader programmatic or ideological plan; states command a (sometimes contested) political dominance over other actors.

By concentrating on the political aspect of rural marketing, we can understand something of the way the state and peasant societies interact. This interaction is complex, and changes over time; it is also powerfully affected by factors such as broader economic change, both national (national development programmes or institutional reorganisations) and international (changes in world crop prices). This article will show how at the local level, this complexity realises itself in a particular political relationship between rural government and rural producers. In this way, it relates to concerns of state legitimacy and peasant attitudes to ‘official’ power. These considerations will be elaborated through the example of Mecúfi district in Cabo Delgado province, Mozambique.