Farming In Mozambique - Whose Model?

Government of Mozambique is expected to approve Prosavana project this year The master plan of Prosavana, a large agricultural project to be implemented in three northern provinces of Mozambique, is due to be approved by the government by the end of 2015, the project’s coordinator said in Maputo. António Limbau also told Portuguese news agency Lusa that the master plan for Prosavana, to be conducted in partnership with the governments of Brazil and Japan, has already been through the stages of public consultation at district and provincial levels and now requires consultations on a national level, to be held in Maputo. This project has led to fears that the communities in the programme would lose their land and prompted protests from inhabitants of the Nacala corridor and by several non-governmental organisations, who questioned the results of a similar experience in Brazil. According to the programme’s coordinator, the main concerns raised by farmers during the public consultation meetings were related to the fear of land loss, despite government assurances that this would not happen in Mozambique and that joining the programme is not compulsory . The biggest steps “have been taken,” the programme coordinator said, who, after the approval of the master plan, expects to see Prosavana launched in 2016. Prosavana is intended to improve the living conditions of the Nacala corridor’s population, modernise agriculture, increase productivity and create new models of agricultural development, currently based on family subsistence production, and to guide them to the market.

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Resistance to Prosavana in Mozambique

PROSAVANA is a cooperation program between Mozambique, Brazil and Japan, which aims to create new models of sustainable agricultural development in Mozambique's savanna region, taking into consideration the conservation of the environment; searching for agrarian development; and oriented to the rural/regional competitive markets. This presentation looks at who is behind the project, the aims of the project and the resistance to the project. The resistance stems from the fact that PROSAVANA aims to integrate peasants in the production process which is exclusively controlled by large TNCs and multilateral financing institutions; there is manipulation of information and intimidation of communities and CSOs opposed to PROSAVANA; there are imminent land grabbing processes in local communities by Brazilian, Japanese and national (as well as other nations) corporations and governments. The presentation argues that with PROSAVANA, the Mozambican government is in fact importing the internal contradictions of the Brazilian agrarian development model.

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