Search

This paper focuses on the role of rural producers’ organizations as factors of innovation in those contexts characterized by subsistence level agricultural production, by means of a case study on the cooperative associations that compose UDCM (União Distrital dos Camponeses de Morrumbala), in the district of Morrumbala (Zambezia province, Mozambique). Our methodology adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, joining together the economic and the anthropological analysis and using both qualitative and quantitative data. Data collected underline that cooperative is a medium useful to mediate between innovations introduction and the transformations of social context in which the members live. Moreover we are going to show that cooperatives are brokers able to introduce peasants to an accumulation pattern without eliminating redistribution dynamics. The social change imposed by a market system that might introduce, by means of the surplus production, to a capitalistic development, is therefore mediated with the local social and cultural context.

This paper analyses the role of rural producers' organisations as elements of innovation processes in contexts characterised by subsistence-level agricultural production. The primary focus is on a group of producers' associations – cooperatives – in the district of Morrumbala (Zambezia Province, Mozambique) where the authors conducted a case study. The interdisciplinary methodology used combines economic and anthropological methods of analysis. The study results indicate that the cooperative organisation is a useful tool to mediate between the introduction of innovation and the transformation of the social context in which its members live. Moreover, the results show that producers' organisations are brokers that are able to introduce peasants to an accumulation pattern that does not eliminate redistribution dynamics. In effect, therefore, the social change imposed by the market system is mediated by the local social and cultural context.