The White Gold: The Role of Government and State in Rehabilitating the Sugar Industry in Mozambique

This article examines the rehabilitation of the sugar industry in Mozambique after the General Peace Accord in 1992, engaging primarily and critically with certain aspects of the business-state literature. It explains why the sugar sector was rehabilitated from the perspectives of Mozambican state, government and industry actors. The article argues that support for the industry cannot be identified in singular and one-dimensional terms, but must include a variety of attributes of support that emerged from a post-independence fusion of industry, state and government officials' historical experiences of success and failure in the industry, and pragmatic as well as longer-term ideological stances. This, it is argued, created a ‘mediating bureaucracy’ that could broker between the diverse interests and aspirations of state/government and industry.     

Seeing like an indigenous community: the World Bank's Agriculture for Development Report read from the perspective of postwar rural Guatemala

This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using ‘agriculture for development’ put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's framework, namely, its neglect of the non-economic forces that structure agrarian poverty, and its neglect of history.