This article first explores the manner in which the colonial and postcolonial state in Côte d'Ivoire has sought to develop and animate rural cooperatives as a means of effecting change in the countryside. It then examines the local realities that the state has encountered in its attempt to organise and control rural cooperatives. In particular, the article shows how ethnicity, age, and contrasting economic interests have undermined state efforts to create sustainable and effective rural cooperatives at the village level. Finally, the article looks at how structural adjustment has led to the retreat of the state and the emergence of a more pluralistic environment in which different rural associations are now competing to represent the interests of rural producers.

Mozambique has undergone some dramatic changes in recent years. The government concluded a 17-year-old civil war in 1992 and held democratic elections in 1994. Following the adoption of structural adjustment policies after 1987, the government eliminated subsidies on food and consumer items, pledged its support for emerging markets, and has now sold most state companies to private investors. These changes have generated much interest among researchers and policymakers, particularly with regard to their impact on the countryside, where the majority of Mozambicans live and work. Recent studies have focused on the most appropriate rural development strategy for Mozambique now that the war has ended, or examined ways to alleviate the widespread poverty that still exists in rural areas. Other work has analysed the structure of agrarian relations or how to ensure food security. Additional research has criticised the government's on-going policy of encouraging and granting land concessions to private investors. It claims that the policy lacks transparency and fails to consider the rights of local communities.

Against enormous odds, non-violent action proved to be a major factor in the downfall of apartheid in South Africa, and the establishment of a democratic black majority government, despite predictions that the transition could come only through a violent revolutionary cataclysm. This was largely the result of conditions working against a successful armed overthrow of the system, combined with the ability of the anti-apartheid opposition to take advantage of the system's economic dependence on a cooperative black labour force. This article traces the history of nonviolent resistance to apartheid, its initial failures, and the return in the 1980s to a largely non-violent strategy which, together with international sanctions, forced the government to negotiate a peaceful transfer to majority rule.

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.