The Green Revolution: Alternatives for Agrarian Development in Mozambique

Conference held from August 17-18, 2007

Rediscovering rural development--an opportunity or a reason for concern?

Farm workers’ organizations and, more generally, civil society, demand that rural development be a central focus in national policy. More than 80% of Mozambique’s poor population lives in rural areas. The majority of them are poor and marginalized rural workers without the ability or physical space to survive in the current context of development.

National policy and programs don’t give due importance to rural workers and their activities when they fail to provide regular and sustainable support the workers’ productive needs. It’s been about 20 years since agricultural producers were forgotten in the midst of economic readjustment programs and national market liberalization, among other neo-liberal policies.

These policies force national agriculture producers to choose between competing with subsidized imports or stop production altogether and seek work in the cities. It is hard to understand how such rural development policies aim to fight poverty as they exclude the poor and establish programs that go against the poor’s interests. Rural workers are faced with an agenda that tends to favor privatization of natural resources and basic services. These tendencies are threatening the economic and cultural survival of many rural producers.

While it is exciting to notice a new and growing interest for rural development, we have reasons to be concerned about the theories behind this interest. We must seek to understand where this new campaign will take us. Unfortunately, its goal appears to be the further application of policies and strategies that caused the impoverishment of rural families and environmental degradation in the first place.

Similar to previously implemented policies that denied support to rural workers and left them in poverty for decades, the new strategies will leave behind those who should be at the center of every rural development strategy. Any rural development plan that is not aimed to serve and support the interest of rural workers and their families will fail. An agenda that focuses only on high potential areas and the so-called “competitive producers” will increase poverty. In the end we will have lost another opportunity to design sustainable agricultural policies based on the reality of the country.

The fact that the rural development agenda is currently controlled by private interests worries us. A new Green Revolution seems to be promoted without recognizing the importance of local knowledge in managing the land, seeds and other resources for production.

We are worried about the visible interest in privatizing natural resources, such as land, water, genetic materials and minerals; and their ownership concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. It seems to us that such privatization is an act to conform our country to the logic dictated by the global supermarkets. Those who function outside the context of this logic and don’t have the ability, knowledge, or values to feed the mentioned highly dynamic markets will be named “unviable” and condemned to vanish.

We demand a new way of thinking about rural development, one that prioritizes the human being. What is most important today is to design national policies of rural development that won’t hurt the interest of the people who have lived and continue to live their autonomous lives as food producers.

The new Green Revolution can not be considered the only solution to solve all the problems in rural development in Mozambique, especially if we take into consideration that it has already been implemented in some African countries and, to an extent, even in our own, without being named such. In fact, the first Green Revolution based in high costs, high technologies and high risk is present throughout the African continent.

Despite the investment of millions of dollars in the last 20 years ($220 million/ year), the Green Revolution was implemented and failed in several countries of the African continent. Behind its failure, we recognize an approach that gives little acknowledgement to the way agricultural producers have been growing and distributing food plus managing the ecosystem.

We are convinced that reapplying this approach will bring similar consequences. Agronomical research is slowly shifting from the state to the private sector, whose primary goal is to profit and obtain the rights to private property. GMO’s are at the core of this research, even though they have not succeeded in showing any concrete benefits for the rural workers in the world.

Our understanding of what Rural Development should be

There is a need for a global vision of rural development. Policies must be socially and environmentally sustainable. We need agricultural systems that keep soils fertile, respect the amount of water available, and protect local varieties of seeds. Rural development should create non-agricultural jobs that support the processing of locally produced raw materials. Rural development should integrate basic social services, such as education, sanitation, health and other infrastructures. Promoting a true development of the rural economy is one of the only ways to overcome poverty in our country.

We would like to emphasize the need of promoting the multiple functions of agriculture in Mozambique. It is time to recognize that the rural areas in our country are the true holders of African culture. Agricultural and food processing systems are an integral part of the cultural process. Thus it is important to recognize, respect, and protect the cultural nature of the country when we design strategies of rural development.

To guarantee the right of appropriately feeding oneself, the State has to recognize that the majority of the rural population must have access to the means of production. The State must guarantee that rural workers will be able to produce their own food. Along with civil society (grassroots organizations), the State needs to reserve the right to reevaluate and regulate international conditionings (dictated by international trade and investing policies, food quality and others) to promote and protect the right of access to food sources appropriately in a national context

Without community food sovereignty, access to seeds and land for pasture, rural workers are unable to appropriately protect themselves. The state can’t privatize or commercialize natural resources such as land, water, biodiversity, genetic resources or traditional knowledge. Organizations comprised of rural women, youth, and workers play a major role and should be involved in any politics concerning rural development. Their right to organize needs to be protected and actively promoted.

Rural development must be based on local food production and on people that sustain themselves through those activities. National agricultural policy should support small scale agriculture and make sure that the producers – especially women - have access to the means of production, lines of credit, incentives and appropriate subsides controlled and managed by the community.

The state should invest in developing sustainable ways for trading and rural credit that are controlled by the farmers. It should also invest in agricultural research based on local knowledge and participatory approaches. Results should be made available and accessible to local agricultural producers.

Food Sovereignty and Green Revolution

Food sovereignty places producers, distributors, and consumers of nutritious food in the center of the agricultural systems. They are not subject to demands from international markets nor corporations that reduce food simply to globally marketable goods. Food sovereignty is a strategy to resist and denounce the unequal and unsustainable systems that cause chronic malnutrition and the escalating increase of obesity.

Food sovereignty is the right of all peoples to access to healthy and culturally appropriate food that is produced by ecological and sustainable techniques. It is the right to decide their agricultural and food system. Food sovereignty includes future generations and their interests. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the corporative and commercial system, and it returns food, agriculture, and cattle raising activities to local producers food.

Food sovereignty prioritizes the local and national economy and market. It strengthens family farms, which include fishing, raising cattle, food processing, distribution and trading rooted in environmental, social and economical sustainability. Food sovereignty promotes transparent trading that guarantees a fair share for all, and it promotes the consumer rights to control food and nutrition. It assures that the rights of use, production and management of land, water, seeds, domesticated animals and biodiversity stay in the hands of the ones food producers. Food sovereignty implies new social relationships, free from oppression and inequality among men and women, different peoples, races, social classes and generations.

For the implementation of the Green Revolution, we must take into consideration the following aspects:

1. Focus on food for people: Guarantee enough healthy and culturally appropriate food for all persons, peoples and communities, and reject the proposal by which food is just a commodity for international trading.

2. Give due value to food producers: Give value to food growers and support their proposals. Respect the rights of men and women, rural workers and family farmers who grow and process food as a way of rejecting policies and actions that take away their value and threaten to eliminate their ways of life.

3. Establish local food systems: Create spaces for meetings among the producers and consumers of food, putting the ones who produce and the ones who consume in the center of all decision making related to food. Protect consumers against low quality foods, against inadequate food aid and food contaminated by GMOs. Avoid governmental structures, contracts, and actions that promote unsustainable international trading by distributing power to international corporations without responsibility for their actions.

4. Strengthen local control: Give control over land, pastures, water, seeds, and cattle to rural workers and local food producers. Respect their rights. They may use and share these resources in a social and ecologically sustainable manner. Avoid privatization of natural resources through laws, commercial contracts and private property regulations that lead to their concentration in the hands of a minority.

5. Develop local knowledge: Strategies must be based on the knowledge of local producers and their organizations who conserve, develop, and manage local production and harvesting systems. Develop appropriate research systems through which knowledge can be transmitted to future generations, and reject technologies that suffocate, threaten and contaminate biodiversity.

6. Work with nature: Take advantage of the diverse attributes of nature through methods of agro-ecological production and harvesting that maximize the ecosystem and improve the ability to adjust and adapt to climate change; Avoid methods that risk the balance of the ecosystem, such as monoculture with use of chemicals, pesticides, and excessive irrigation.

Final Words

Life in the rural areas has been devastated by years of unfavorable policies to rural workers, imposed on the government by the multilateral and bilateral allies. They have weakened public institutions that manage demand by guaranteeing emergency food reserves and minimum prices for rural workers. Additionally, privatization of government organs that give credit to rural workers has without support to produce and without buyers for their products.

The solution for the crisis doesn’t necessarily rely on the establishment of industrial agriculture in our country. Paradoxically, an increase in production of some crops might be followed by an even worse hunger situation and considerable environmental damage. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers eventually degrade the soil, leading to a decline in productivity. The high cost of inputs deepens the gap between the wealthy and poor farmers, worsening hunger.

Developed countries report many experiences of negative impacts from monoculture and GMOs. At the same time industrial agriculture is promoted in African countries – why? We should learn from lessons in the past and try to be creative and courageous in designing our development strategies. Or else, the mistakes from the past will simply be duplicated, and, in name of globalization, rural workers will become even more impoverished.

We must recognize the important difference between “development” and technological advance. The latter does not necessarily mean improvement of quality of life to rural workers and their families; often it results in a widening of poverty. Technology is not always a panacea.