Contexts behind differentiated responses to contract farming and large-scale land acquisitions in Central Mozambique: Post-war experiences, social relations, and power balance of local authorities

The question of whether or not contract farming (CF) can be an alternative pathway for agricultural commercialization in Africa has been discussed widely, particularly after the world-wide large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA) of 2008/9. This article attempts to reposition the discussions into local settings by illustrating contextspecific pictures of external interventions including that of CF and LSLA, in a case of soybean project in Central Mozambique. Two villages under the same project were comparatively analyzed focusing on differentiated political reactions ?from below?: the local people in one village were hesitant about participating in CF and resisted a CF company and LSLA, whereas the local people in the other village actively participated in CF, and incorporated LSLA into their livelihoods. The findings based on fieldwork suggest that in the former village, postwar experiences of rural revitalization, a self-supporting network based on matrilineal lineage, and overlapping roles of traditional and political authorities were a foundation for the resistance. In contrast, in the latter village, historically accumulated dependency on external interventions, social differentiation based on money-oriented capitalistic relations, and concentration of power on a local leader were a foundation of incorporation.