“Grassroot development”, innovation and rural producers’ organizations: a mozambican case study

Abstract

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.