This article examines the expansion of agribusiness and the evolution of land grabbing in Brazil and Mozambique. The modernization of Brazil’s agricultural sector, which began in the 1960s, successfully expanded into the cerrado region in the 1980s under the state-led PRODECER project. Modernization and state-led programmes such as PRODECER gave new rise to different forms and practices of land grabbing, creating spaces for investment by foreigners. Over the last three decades the production of soybeans in the cerrado has come under substantial foreign control and in recent years, sugarcane production and foreign investment in the ethanol industry has grown markedly in the region; the social and environmental effects of this have been devastating. In this article we will also examine the recent interest of Brazilian agribusinesses in investing in Mozambican land and in particular, the ProSAVANA programme modelled on PRODECER. We argue that while Brazil is subject to land grabbing by foreign capital, it has also become a promoter of land grabbing in Mozambique.

In Brazil, the expansion of sugarcane for ethanol production has fundamentally altered the rural landscape and represents a significant change in the trajectory of the country’s rural development and agrarian reform policies. Current policies are highly skewed in favour of agrofuel industries and are denying landless rural workers and peasant families, like those of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), access to land. In addition to the heavy social costs, the agrofuel industry threatens the environment by polluting the air, water and land. This paper elucidates the socio-environmental impacts of the burgeoning sugarcane-ethanol industry in the Pontal do Paranapanema, a region in the extreme west of the São Paulo state with a long history of land-related conflicts. While corporations reap astronomical profits from the agrofuel industry, the costs of agrofuel expansion in the Pontal do Paranapanema and in Brazil have been disproportionally borne by the environment and the most impoverished and marginalized members of society.

No abstract

In Brazil, the Food Acquisition Program (PAA), implemented in 2003 under the administration of the former president Lula, is a two-pronged public policy which creates rural employment while reducing food insecurity among vulnerable segments of the Brazilian population. Since 2012, small-scale pilot projects inspired by PAA have been implemented in five African countries, including Mozambique, under the PAA Africa initiative with the support of the Brazilian government. Based on interviews and fieldwork conducted in Mozambique, this article examines the PAA pilot project in Tete province - implemented by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP). The program's implementation process, its relationship to the PRONAE (school lunch) pilot projects, as well as its main achievements, benefits and challenges are highlighted. The author holds that the creation of institutional markets in Mozambique through local food-purchasing and school-feeding programs, like the PAA and PRONAE, promotes an endogenous and sustainable form of rural development that has considerable potential to reduce rural poverty and food insecurity in a far-reaching manner in the long term. Considerations for the future of the PAA are also discussed.