Rural Poverty and Poverty Alleviation in Mozambique: What’s Missing from the Debate?

There has been a surge in data gathering and literature on rural poverty and poverty reduction in post-war Mozambique. Most of the literature is agreed on the need to prioritise the stabilisation of the rural population in smallholder family farming, on secure tenure terms. Underlying this agreement are both economic assumptions and political presumptions, and a common antipathy to large farms, be they colonial plantations, socialist state farms or large capitalist agricultural enterprises representing “external interests†. Drawing on a broader historical literature on rural Mozambique, and on the results of a small, illustrative case-study of female wage labourers on the cotton fields of the Lomaco joint venture in Gaza Province, this paper argues that the current mainstream literature on rural Mozambican poverty under-estimates the significance of dynamic forces within rural society, including social differentiation, class formation and the role of wage labour, and population movement on a grand and local scale. Wage labour in agriculture, especially involving women, and labour migration are more important to the survival of the poorest in Mozambique than the mainstream literature acknowledges. Both factors are shown to have important policy implications. On the basis of this discussion, there is a clear need for further research and more open policy debate around the issues raised in this paper.