Jobs, Votes and Legitimacy: The Political Economy of the Mozambican Cashew Processing Industry's Revival

Abstract

This article seeks to explain the revival of the Mozambican cashew processing industry after it was virtually wiped out by liberalisation policies at the turn of the millennium. Over the last decade state, private and external actors have cooperated to rehabilitate cashew processing with a concerted industrial policy and rents generated by protection. It is argued that such rent creation is a political process and that theories of ‘good governance’ and ‘developmental neopatrimonialism’ are unable to explain political support to the cashew sector in Mozambique. The ‘developmental state’ literature is a more useful guide not only to how the industry was rehabilitated, but also to where the political ‘will to develop’ originated in other contexts. Following from this discussion, it is argued that in Mozambique an elite ideology of nationalism, modernisation and anti-imperialism paved the way for protection of the cashew industry, while more active support was a result of more immediate concerns around finely balanced elections, inadequate employment generation in the broader economy and the faltering legitimacy of the ruling party.

Keywords:

• Mozambique
• cashew
• political economy
• industrial policy
• developmental state
• inclusive growth
• good governance

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to teaching staff and students at SOAS, especially Jonathan Di John, Gilbert Achcar, Chris Cramer and Carlos Oya for their intellectual guidance. I am also grateful for specific advice and support provided in the course of this research by Chiara Mariotti, Joseph Hanlon, Sara Stevano, Thandika Mkandawire and Matthias Krause. All remaining shortcomings and mistakes are my own.

Notes

¹A page on its website states that ‘The World Bank has always regarded industrialization in developing countries as a major element of the structural transformation process that signifies economic development’, http://lnweb90.worldbank.org/oed/oeddoclib.nsf/DocUNIDViewForJavaSearch/E1296FC42FE79980852567F5005CAE85.

²The quote is from Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco (Eduardo Mondlane University; Institute for Social and Economic Studies, Maputo) in Mozambique News Reports & Clippings (2012).

³Askoy and Yagci's (2012, pp. 26–32) methodology is used to compute the values. They find the most reliable source of data on Mozambique's processed cashew exports to be partner reporting in the Comtrade (2012) database. For each year, the sum is taken of imports of processed cashew from Mozambique reported by every country (except India, which only imports raw cashew to supply its own processing industry).

⁴Based on Incaju's (2011, p. 29) assertion that 100 tonnes of cashew processed creates 38 permanent factory jobs per year.

⁵Yields peak every four to six years and are followed by low yield years.

⁶Personal communication, 4 July 2012