Between populist rhetoric of market-oriented agricultural development and rural resistance in Mozambique

Abstract

The ProSAVANA program is one of the public policies that clearly expose the tendency of governmental politics towards market-oriented agricultural development in Mozambique. Nevertheless, it configures itself as one of, if not the most contested agrarian public policy in the country since independence in 1975. Going throughout changing of regimes, from colonial, then going through a socialist driven government to adopting a market-oriented approach roughly after only a decade of socialism, we argue that State agricultural policies and vision has always been inimical to the peasantry, although the rhetoric was generally portrayed as in favor of the poorest rural populations. ProSAVANA emerges from the same discourses and is embedded in an authoritarian populist regime operated by FRELIMO, which as we argue in this paper, was built and consolidated since independence. In this paper, we attempt a deep analysis of how, a resistance movement that was built through agency of rural constituencies in alliance with a broader civil society sector, have been confronting Mozambique’s populist and authoritarian rural politics through the lens of the ProSAVANA program.