A reply to Pitcher

Abstract

Pitcher's rejoinder to our paper (Cramer & Pontara 1998), is a useful contribution to the policy and analytical debate on poverty and rural relations in Mozambique. Some of her points are well taken, in particular her careful attention to empirical imprecision in much of the literature. Indeed, she points out that we used a figure for how much land the government had conceded to private owners that turns out to be mistaken. We accept this useful clarification graciously, though slightly less graciously would point out that Pitcher earlier cited the same (erroneous) figure herself.

Overall, her complaint about our paper seems to boil down to the following: that we are incomplete in our coverage of the literature; that we fail to notice that the government may say it favours smallholders but is in fact leaving them high and dry by allocating resources to large-scale commercial investors; and that we present an exclusive choice between the land and the labour market as the solution to poverty in Mozambique. On the first point, our coverage was indeed less than complete, though the implications of this are not as Pitcher implies. On the second, we think the picture is more complex than she suggests, and if our paper did not make this adequately clear we shall try to make it more so here. On the third part of her complaint, Pitcher is plainly wrong: in fact, the most interesting thing about her comment on our paper is that she appears entirely to have missed the point that we were making and does not engage with our core argument at all. She is at pains to agree with our discussion of the socioeconomic differentiation that has a long-term and more recent history in rural Mozambique, and to present the lives of the poor as highly insecure. Nonetheless, she makes little effort to consider the implications of this beyond making the fairly obvious point that people hang onto their land when they can and pursue multiple and ‘redundant’ (whatever this is supposed to mean) strategies.