Mozambique: Looking for Food in All the Wrong Places

June 24, 2016

With climate change-induced storms devastating Mozambique, the importance of climate resilient farms is clear. This piece, and “Seeds of Climate Resilience in Mozambique,” recounted in more detail in Eating Tomorrow, highlight both the devastation of climate change and the value of agroecological farming.

MAPUTO: I spent another week in Mozambique looking for ProSAVANA, the much-touted, much-reviled Japanese-Brazilian-Mozambican agriculture project that has spectacularly failed to turn Mozambique’s savannah-lands in the Nacala Corridor into a giant soybean plantation modeled on Brazil’s Cerrado region. I was there doing follow-up research for a book.

I hadn’t found much evidence of ProSAVANA two years ago (see my previous articles hereand here) and I didn’t find much now. Government officials wouldn’t talk about it. Japanese development cooperation representatives spoke only of pathetically small extension services to a few small-scale farmers. Private investors were scarce. Civil society groups debated whether it is worth cooperating in the wholesale redesign of the program.

I wondered why anyone would bother. Like many of the grand schemes hatched in the wake of the 2007–2008 food price spikes, this one was a bust, by any measure. Still, ProSAVANA remains the…