Food policy and production in Mozambique since independence

Abstract

Mozambique's food crisis is one of the most disastrous in Africa. Undeniably a result of systematic South African destabilisation, and made worse in the last years by drought, it has its origins in the colonial structure of agriculture and the shock of the sudden Portuguese exodus at Independence. But the paper explores, as Frelimo's 1983 Fourth Congress did, whether policy choices have not made matters worse. Attention is drawn to the last few years’ emphasis on the former settler sector, its conversion to complex, costly and not very productive state farms; to low prices of food, to sustain an essentially Portuguese urban diet — all to the detriment of peasant farming.

Peasant Agriculture in Mozambique: The Case of Chokwe, Gaza Province

“…First, these projects, like other donor-sponsored peasant projects found in neighbouring Tanzania (Coulson 1977;Raikes 1984), depended mainly on imported producer Downloaded by [University of Exeter] at 09:53 14 July 2015 (seed, fertilizer, ploughs, hoes, and sickles) and consumer goods (motorcycles, bicycles, and rubber boots) which arrived from months to years after the projects were initiated officially. To make matters worse, equipment and vehicles usually arrived without spare parts so that, when they broke down, they were permanently out of circulation.…”

“…Yet priority was clearly given to the state farms. It was decided to develop and extend the state farm sector, using high technology in order to increase the urban food supply as soon as possible and to provide export crops to bring in foreign exchange (Raikes 1984). From 1977From to 1983, the period between the Third and Fourth Party Congresses, the consistent policy of the Frelimo government was to place the largest share of agricultural investment in the state farm sector and to let cooperatives, peasant and private farming evolve on the basis of their own internal resources (Hanlon 1984, Roesch 1984, Bowen 1986).…”

Las Mujeres y el Mito de la Agricultura de Subsistencia. De la exportación de alimentos a la dependencia alimentaria en el sur de Mozambique

“…Finalmente, para conirmar la estrategia contra el campo del III Congreso, se tomó la decisión de dar prioridad a las machambas estatales: grandes extensiones de cultivos que, en muchos casos, aglutinaban antiguas plantaciones abandonadas por colonos que decidieron huir. El estado asumió la gestión de estas grandes Casal, 1988;Raikes, 1985 Si bien la apuesta por las machambas estatales se alimentó del sueño productivista -la inversión en tecnología a cualquier precio-, su origen está en la voluntad de no dar ningún tipo de alas al campesino medio rural, del que se sospechaba que quería ocupar el vacío dejado por el cantinero y el colono.…”

“…De nuevo, el experimento resultó ineicaz, e incluso acabó teniendo resultados contrarios a los que pretendía asegurar: generó escasez de productos en las zonas rurales, desincentivó la producción de alimentos entre aquellas familias que estaban en condiciones de producir excedentes (Casal, 1988), y alimentó un mercado paralelo (candonga) donde los precios de productos básicos resultaron ser mucho más abusivos que el de los antiguos cantineros (cf. Cravinho, 1998;Raikes, 1985). La escasez y la corrupción asociada generaron gran frustración en amplios sectores de la población, pues con el pasar de los años se hacía cada vez más evidente que las condiciones de vida estaban empeorando.…”

Large-scale land acquisitions aggravate the feminization of poverty: findings from a case study in Mozambique

“…The exodus of Portuguese with important skills and resources in combination with escalating Renamo attacks and territorial mining practices contributed to the collapse of the marketing, transport, and supply systems (Raikes 1984). In addition, the lack of governmental support to the smallholder sector-a consequence of Frelimo's predilection to large-scale state farms that proved ineffective and unwieldy to manage (Dinerman 2001)-led to the starving of rural areas of resources and the consequential collapse of agriculture by the early 1980s (Mosca 2011).…”