In the light of Mozambique’s natural resources boom—especially its large-scale investments in mining, oil, and gas—this paper analyses the prospects for the extractive industries to contribute to economic transformation from an institutional perspective. To this purpose, we address the institutional dynamics of the resources sector and consider the underlying causes of the identified outcomes. The National Development Strategy, as the instrument presenting the vision for economic transformation and diversification, is discussed. The paper is based on a desk review—documental and bibliographic—and on primary data gathered by the authors as part of their research into the field of natural resources and the political economy of development. We conclude that, given Mozambique’s political patronage and clientelism, intra-ruling elite competition, limited productive base, weak state capacity, high level of poverty, and recurrent fiscal deficits, the prospects of the current resource boom leading to economic transformation, despite its considerable potential, are at best uncertain.
In Mozambique, policy discourses supporting the expansion of large-scale capitalist agriculture have largely focused on its potential to increase agricultural production and productivity. In particular, they have highlighted the potential contribution to rural employment and income, and their impacts on poverty reduction. Yet in focusing narrowly on these dynamics, they have ignored the contradictions of social reproduction of labour often associated with the expansion of capitalist production. This paper explores these contradictions by considering primary and secondary evidence from two contexts of expansion of large-scale capitalist agriculture in Mozambique. It argues that these contradictions have manifested in diverse forms, reflecting the extent to which forms of expansion and (re)organisation of sectors of capitalist agricultural production, and the associated forms of labour exploitation, have affected different spheres of social reproduction of labour in these contexts. Moreover, the paper suggests, they have reproduced more broadly, as the expansion/intensification of the extractive logic of accumulation has compromised ‘alternative’ spaces of social reproduction.
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