Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the confusion surrounding the purported return of failed 1980’s and 1990’s IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment in Africa. It argues that Structural Adjustment is not returning but re-affirming itself, for it had remained the standard paradigm for Africa and the global economy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the confusion and anxiety surrounding the purported return of failed 1980’s and 1990’s IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment in Africa.

The newly independent Africa borrowed in international banks at low interest rates to finance long-term development projects. This credit availability followed massive OPEC petrodollar revenues, the first oil shock of 1973, deposited in Western banks, creating excessive money supply within a low profit rate environment, hence no new investment, leading to stagflation in the West and collapse of Keynesian economics and the rise of monetarism. Monetarists explained stagflation ushering in a new era and paradigm shift in multilateral trade system governing the IMF and World Bank. Following the second oil shock of 1979, monetarist governments of Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, raised interest rates to curb inflation causing debt overhang and balance of payment crisis as Africa could not service the debt. As a condition for debt rescheduling and access to international credit markets, Africa had join the World Bank and IMF and implement structural adjustment. Structural adjustment aimed at economic restructuring towards lessening state economic role and unleashing the private sector via liberalization, privatization and fiscal and monetary austerity in order to relaunch economic growth and debt payment. Structural adjustment failed to deliver on structural change, capacity building and human development. This paper argues that Structural Adjustment is not returning to Africa, it is rather re-affirming itself, for it had remained the standard paradigm for Africa and the global economy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper offers an historically based, political economy critique of the narratives of economic crises and of the logic of the austerity focused policies of the SAPs and suggests a theory to understand the dynamics of crises and of policy alternatives, based on the Mozambican experience.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers an historically based, political economy critique of the narratives of economic crises and of the logic of the austerity focused policies of the SAPs. In doing so, it suggests a theory of capital accumulation in Mozambique that explains the dialectics of economic expansion and crises, from which policy alternatives can be drawn.

The paper looks at two great, post-independent crises, which led to large IMF/World Bank interventions, and argues that they can be better explained by studying their historically, class-based dynamics, as opposed to the monetarist approach of the SAPs. The great crisis of the 1980s, which led to Mozambique joining the Bretton Woods framework, was primarily created by a vision of state-centred accumulation that failed to address the need for transformation of the social conditions of production, specialization and labour reproduction inherited from colonialism, which was ideologically supported by a dualistic view of the peasantry and an obsession with great leaps in the development of the productive forces dependent upon expectation of foreign aid that never materialized. The crises of the 2010s results directly from the historical logic of the mode of capital accumulation, which can be described by the waves of state expropriation combined with long term austerity. The combination of the SAPs with the historical conditions of accumulation the the SAPs did not address led to a dialectic and cumulative dynamic of financialization and narrowing down of economic specialization, which reproduced the conditions of instability and crises.

Paper short abstract:

This paper places the current Mozambique's IMF support program in the context of SAPs 'return' to Africa. It argues that the reform package associated with this has socioeconomic and political implications that have led to class conflicts and tensions around accumulation and social reproduction.

Paper long abstract:

The World Bank-IMF structural adjustment programs (SAPs) have returned to Africa, along with their tight fiscal and monetary stabilisation measures. In Mozambique, SAPs ‘return’ follows another crisis of the system of capital accumulation. ‘Initiated’ in the second half of the past decade, it has been exacerbated by an unprecedent debt crisis (associated with the so-called ‘hidden debts’), and further by the impacts of natural disasters, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and, more recently, by the commodities price crisis attributed to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. SAPs ‘return’ to Mozambique is currently reflected in the ongoing three-year (2022-2025) IMF support program which started in June 2022, and has been justified by these crises dynamics and narratives. It is set to ‘support sustainable and inclusive growth and long-term macroeconomic stability’, by focusing on tight monetary and fiscal policies, including tax administration and public expenditure reforms.

This paper places the current IMF support program in Mozambique in the context of SAPs ‘return’ to Africa. By offering a radical political economy critique of SAPs and alternatives, the paper argues that the overall reform package associated with the current Mozambique’s IMF program has socioeconomic and political implications that have led to class conflicts and tensions around the conditions of accumulation and social reproduction. These have precipitated a ‘state-sponsored’ and contradictory process of class restructuring around opportunities of capital accumulation, which, besides in conflict with the IMF program, does not address the structural and political economy dynamics relevant for a broad-based strategy of economic and social transformation.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the complex variety of forces pressing to shape a climate transition in South Africa today, and the prospect of a new 'green structural adjustment'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the struggle taking place to shape the ecological future of South Africa, a struggle which raises important questions about who will control future ecology, in whose interests, with what methods, and to what ends.

Africa as whole contributes around just 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions but is warming at twice the global mean. South Africa is Africa's major emitter as a consequence of a coal dominated energy system (Eskom) and the production of liquid fuel from coal (Sasol). These institutions were central to apartheid's racist and exclusionary 'development' project. Climate justice issues are more than energy (and pollution), of course, but relate to land use and degradation, drought, flooding, food insecurity, loss of biodiversity, and climate migration. South Africa is a country where social, class, gender, race, and environmental injustice have long been deeply intertwined in its socio-ecological system of accumulation. Whilst just transition initiatives and alternatives 'from below' exist in many forms (and movements), other, often more powerful forces, both national and global, are present, vying to shape the transition, notably:

-the EU's carbon border taxes from 2023 and their impact on South African industry;

-a rapidly changing climate finance space, and with it a likely rising debt burden;

-a rush to develop green hydrogen, largely by large corporate players;

-state contestation given important support for coal interests and gas.

Capital restructuring, job losses, and 'green washing' seem likely as a transition looks set to be complex, chaotic, contradictory, and harsh, with new forms of exclusion reproducing patterns of the past.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reads critically the austerity narrative in Mozambique since the 1980s as fiscal-monetary discipline that has led to greater privatization, financialisation and reproduction risks, illustrating results through the workings of an agrobusiness financial intermediary.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deploys a Marxist critique to explicate the austerity narrative in Mozambique since the 1980’s adjustment programmes as a dynamic that leads to the unfolding of the next crises. Contrary to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, the hand of austerity intervention is very ‘visible’ in disciplining monetary and fiscal policies supposed to achieve stabilisation, inflation control, or economic growth, at the detriment of social reproduction. Selected state actions are highlighted here to show the links from privatisation to foreign direct investment to ‘finance for development’ entailing state leveraging of private financial flows. Effects have included a narrower productive economy. The current inflation crisis has invited renewed disciplining policies in recent framework documents. Far from a “new paradigm” of development, they point to persisting (inter)national accumulation patterns, enhanced by growing financialisation. Agriculture is a good example of this. The initial withdrawal of state services, coupled with privatisation and external funding for commercial agriculture failed to generate private investment, yet opened the door to further privatisation and eventually financialisation. Agriculture has come back on the agenda, this time mostly funded with risk capital leveraged by states. This Marxist political economy approach to an exemplary case, an agrobusiness financial intermediary, illustrates the concrete processes and consequences of its modus operandi. As such, it provides a comprehensive and realistic understanding of the forces at work by integrating finance and spheres production in a systemic manner that illuminates the roots, reach, and risks of austerity-led policies in Mozambique.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses African rice imports and examines how multinational traders navigate African political economies and shape them in turn. By crowding out the market for rice and depressing domestic competition, multinational traders contribute to reinforcing uneven productive structures.

Paper long abstract:

Studying the market strategies and business trajectories of southern multinational companies operating in Africa can help problematise some assumptions in the global value chain literature. The global rice supply chain is a case in point as this is a market where the participation of both southern traders and African consumers is on the rise. It has been argued that a trade-off for southern multinationals in southern markets is the existence of heightened local competition. In the case of rice, we find that South-South trade makes visible - on the contrary - the existence of profound unevenness within the south and helps us trace how this unevenness is produced and sustained also in south-south interactions.

This paper examines the role of the large global rice traders sourcing rice from South and Southeast Asia and their position as dominant traders in African rice markets. Although a large share of the import bill of these agriculture-based economies is spent on importing rice, most debates about upgrading in African agriculture call for export-oriented opportunities in horticulture and high value agroexports, with relative neglect for import substitution in food staples.

This paper discusses rice import dependency in Africa and examines how multinational rice traders navigate African political economies and shape them in turn. By crowding out the market for rice and depressing domestic competition, multinational traders contribute to reinforcing uneven structures shaping consumption, productive capability acquisition and ultimately, structural transformation.