Recent dramatic increases and shifts in Zaire's population have had significant influences upon both the supply and the demand for basic foods, with profound effects being registered on maize in urban Shaba and in the Kasai regions. Urban demand for food, such as maize, increased rapidly, not only as a result of population increases, but also due to investment and income distribution policies which favored urban areas. These factors present a problem of developing an expanded production system, together with a distribution system capable of delivering mere food to the growing urban market. This paper focuses on the marketing of maize and is directed to improving the understanding of factors which influence the nature and effectiveness of the marketing process. Information presented here is based on a study of the production and marketing of maize in the districts of Tshilenge, Gandajika. Mwene-Ditu, and Kaniama, in south-central Zaire. This included a 1974-75 survey of 299 producers interviewed in their villages, a separate survey of 93 producers who were selling their maize in rural and urban markets of the Kasai Oriental region, and the analysis of the retail price shares received by various marketing agents in each of three different types of rural-urban market channels. These results are more fully discussed in an Oregon State University Ph.D. thesis by one of the authors.