When the chair of the South African Chamber for the Development of Agriculture in Africa (Sacada) visited Niassa exactly one year ago, he wrote in the visitors’ book at the provincial government offices: “The delegation from South Africa looks forward to help build Niassa to a paradise.”
A paradise for whom?
Sacada, affiliated to the Freedom Front, seeks to resettle Afrikaans farmers in African countries. Small groups have emigrated to Zambia and Congo, but the litmus test is the Mosagrius project in Mozambique’s northern Niassa province.
In Sacada’s script, South African (white- owned) agribusiness will increase Africa’s food production and food security, boost the economy of poorer countries, create jobs and thus stem illegal immigration to South Africa.
These arguments ring hollow when applied to Niassa. The fura-arames (barbed-wire- cutters), as illegal immigrants to South Africa are known, come from Mozambique’s southern and central provinces. Hundreds of kilometres north of the border, Niassa is too far away.
Its people – and its economy – are linked to neighbouring countries. Its maize is sold to Malawians, its gold smuggled to Tanzania. Niassa does not suffer food insecurity. Its children are not malnourished. Since the peace agreement of 1992, its farmers have steadily grown a bigger surplus of maize every year. But they can’t sell it. Roads are bad, cash and credit non-existent, the marketing infrastructure in ruins from 17 years of war.
Last month, peasants threw out last year’s surplus crop to make room in the granaries for 1997’s mealies. On the last day of July – payday in Malawi -hundreds of Malawians on bicycles snaked up and down the hilly road from the border town of Mandinga. Like ants, each man laboured with a 90kg bag of maize. The price: 60 kwachas (about R5). In Malawi, a 60kg bag costs 160 kwachas. Cheap, but not an efficient marketing method.
This year, for the first time since colonial times, Mozambique grew enough maize – 1 043-million tons – for its needs. Most was grown in the northern provinces – and stayed there, because it is too costly to move it to the maize-hungry south.
“Our farmers could grow more, if they could sell it, and even more, if they got direct support,” says Marcos Wiriamo, head of rural development at a local NGO and representative for the Forum for Land Rights or NET, from its Portuguese acronym.
NET groups some dozen NGOs in Niassa. It was set up after a seminar on Mosagrius held in Lichinga at the end of 1996, months after the agreement had been signed in May. That was the first time the matter was discussed publicly in the province.
Even today, the agreement has not been widely disseminated. Two weeks ago, the agricultural administrator in Majune district, where the first settlers are clearing land, had not seen a copy. The lack of communication with provincial and district authorities is typical of Frelimo’s centralising, top-to-bottom tendency.
“It was a high-level government decision. We couldn’t refuse it; we could only accept,” says Wiriamo. In terms of accountability and transparency, Mosagrius has been poorly conducted. Negotiations were secret and turbulent. The first Mozambican negotiator, Paulo Zucula, who reportedly favoured tougher conditions on Mozambique’s side, was soon replaced by weaker officials.
Little information is available on the credit and grants given to each settler by Sacada, or on its capital and funding. As of the end of July, the location and sizes of concessions had not been made public. NET sees its role as a watchdog to protect farmers’ rights. Its first complaint, echoed in the local media, was that South Africans paid workers daily or weekly, while the practice in Mozambique is monthly wages, preferred by poor families.
Environmental concerns hinge on the agriculture practised by South Africa’s commercial farmers, heavy on pesticides and fertilisers. Without a proper environmental impact study and regulations, Niassa’s key rivers, the Lugenda and the Rovuma, clean until now, risk chemical pollution.
Mosagrius got the best land along the Lugenda river, which crosses Niassa diagonally. Although plentiful at an annual 1 000 to 1 500mm, rainfall in Niassa is not enough to sustain intensive agriculture. Dams will have to be built on the Lugenda. A chain of dams would reduce its flow.
The Lugenda is key also for the Mecula game reserve in Niassa’s northeast corner, against the border with Tanzania. Its 10 000 elephants, large buffalo herds, leopards and lions, roaming over 21 000 sq kms, depend on the Lugenda’s clean and abundant flow. A reduced flow would also reduce the fish catch. Peasants derive up to 80% of their cash selling fish. “If the South Africans bring jobs, cash and access to markets, they are welcome. If they come to create dependency relations and to destroy the few sources of income of peasants, we shouldn’t allow it,” says land expert Jose Negrao.
From a social perspective, there is a fear that the settlers will reproduce the system of tenant labour prevalent in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga. Instead of farming their own “machambas” (plots) on their community’s land, farm workers would live in rural townships set up close to commercial farms.
One way to avoid creating a class of landless peasants, to date unknown in Mozambique, would be to intersperse the settlers’ concessions among existing communities – all on fertile land. Peasants’ rights to land they occupy, whether they have a title deed or not, are guaranteed by a new land Bill approved by Mozambique’s Parliament last week.
Sacada says its farmers will only settle on uninhabited land. True, several districts where they have been assigned are scarcely populated. But land without people on it does not mean it does not belong to one of Niassa’s Yao or Makua communities.
“No matter how deep you go into the bush at Majune, people will tell you that land belongs to such and such regulo (traditional chief),” says Wiriamo.
The regulos first opposed Mosagrius until the government called them to a seminar and sold them the idea. “To the Yao, ownership of land is an alien concept, and a 50-year renewable concession is pie in the sky,” says agricultural technician Gareth Davies, who has worked with them for eight years.
Among the Yao, land is used according to need. They practise migratory agriculture, where land is left fallow for three or four years. When the machambas are too far for a daily walk, the whole village moves. The cycle spreads over 50 to 100 years. Land not under cultivation is still part of their economy, used for fishing, hunting, grass, thatch, fruit, honey, roots and herbal medicines.
Yao farmers survived, unaided, through the colonial regime, liberation struggle and civil war. How to ensure they prosper from South African agribusiness is the challenge.