The following piece is part of my PhD research’s literature review where I reflect on how agricultural production in Mozambique has been studied. My aim is to identify how this literature generates a particular narrative of the relationship between agriculture and social development, the questions it asks about productivity and about social meanings of small-scale holdings for society and the country’s economy and food security.

Existing sources of information seem to converge in highlight the importance of family agriculture: in Mozambique 99,98% of agricultural holdings are family held and these family smallholders farm 99,7% of the locally produced food (Sitoe, 2005; Camarada, 2014 and Uaiene, 2014). According to Uaiene (2014), there has been a decline in production and productivity per family exploitation in the last decades, which limits the households´ capacity of generating income, savings and sufficient food for satisfying their needs. This statement presents us with the challenge of understanding what the author understands under the concepts of (1) family agriculture, (2) productivity decline, and (3) household.

In agrarian studies it is very common to use the concepts of household and family indistinctly (Agarwal, 1994; Zwarteveen, 2006). The concept of household has been used as a unit for data collection and analysis for establishing a social unit’s basic income, nutritional and other needs and the means for covering them. However, this concept of the development field has failed to comprehend that female-lead units are analytically different and, accordingly, it has failed to understand African family systems, therefore the concept of family agriculture is equally contested (O’Laughlin, 1995). This means that whatever definition we use to study the social relations within the machambas will have great influence in our understanding of their production organization, and its role in terms of livelihoods in the particular context of Infulene Valley.