Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes an emerging conflict between Mozambican female cassava traders and NGOs, state agencies, and firms seeking to commodify this starchy staple for production of a commercial beer. Women's battle reveals the limits of the "Green Revolution" model for African agricultural development.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, persistently high hunger rates in rural Mozambique have catalyzed the rise of public-private partnerships and donor-funded agricultural "value chains" as leading instruments for enhancing food security. According to the "Green Revolution" model for African agricultural development, participation in value chains will raise smallholder farmer incomes through commercialization of key crops, access to "improved" inputs, and strengthened markets; new income will in turn enable the purchase of more healthy food for rural families. Yet such initiatives underestimate not only the complexity of the food system they seek to change, but the gendered histories that shape farmer decision-making on the ground. In Inhambane, a high-profile cassava value chain spearheaded by the South African brewer SABMiller,* its subsidiary Cervejas de Moçambique, and the Dutch company DADTCO, has stumbled for precisely these reasons since its launch in 2013. Seeking to transform the starchy tuber from a food staple to a raw material for the world's first cassava-based commercial beer, value chain proponents have overlooked the social meanings of a crop women have grown and exchanged for over a century. They also failed to anticipate the spirited reaction of female cassava traders, or maguevas, who since the 1980s have been transporting and selling the area's cassava to Inhambane migrants in Maputo, and who are battling to preserve this rural-urban trade. Drawing on oral interviews, survey data, and archival research, the paper offers an historical perspective on this conflict and its implications for Green Revolution-inspired plans to "modernize" smallholder agriculture.