Farther east, on a dry plateau not far from the border with Tanzania, the multinational mining company Gemfields—among the world’s largest suppliers of sapphires and emeralds—became interested in a ruby deposit discovered by a local farmer in 2009.8 By the time Gemfields got involved, the land was controlled by Raimundo Pachinuapa, a Frelimo general and the former governor of the province, Cabo Delgado. As the journalist Estacio Valoi has reported, locals dispute Pachinuapa’s claims that he compensated them for the land, but he was nonetheless able to secure a prospecting license and Gemfields’s backing to dig rubies out from 81,000 hectares of red clay. Once mining got under way, farmers and small-scale local miners clashed with the company and complained of violence at the hands of the security subcontractors and plainclothes vigilantes. In 2014, units from the Forças de Intervenção Rápida, Mozambique’s equivalent of a SWAT team, responded to the unrest by burning more than three hundred homes.9
Both the Chikweti forestry project and the Hoyo Hoyo soybeangrowing operation in Lioma undoubtedly suffered setbacks as a result of land protests. In Lioma, the local administrator prolonged the standoff by siding with the smallholders. UNAC’s Niassa chapter appealed to the stated mission of Chikweti’s investors in a petition: “We do not understand why church institutions and other investment funds invest their members’ money in projects that exploit the poorest of the poor.”
But both projects were ultimately undone by the underlying economics. The commodities they wanted to produce became too cheap; the costs of doing business in a remote country with poor roads and unreliable power were too great to make either scheme viable. Demand for rubies is apparently not as sensitive to price fluctuations as it is for wood pulp and soybeans. Both a sitting president and an attorney general made visits to Montepuez in the wake of strife between Gemfields and local people, and yet today, mining continues in what observers now believe to be the largest field of rubies in the world.
Over time, scenarios like these have given rise to a deep skepticism that the basic protections the land law prescribes will actually be upheld. Investors, after all, are supposed to have access only to “unused land,” or to enter into negotiations with the communities their projects will displace. However incrementally, the growing record of overreach has prompted a reevaluation of Mozambique’s long-held development strategy, which has often pushed large-scale investor-driven projects above all else.
In 2009, Mozambique signed a partnership with Japan and Brazil to transform millions of acres of “unproductive” land in the north of the country into a showcase for development.10 The project, dubbed ProSAVANA, was predicated on the idea that the economies of scale unleashed by foreign capital and expertise would accelerate development across northern Mozambique.
ProSAVANA was to be modeled after the 1980s boom that transformed the vast, dry Brazilian Cerrado into a feeding trough for the global meat industry: together, Brazilian corporations and Japanese know-how would harness a North Carolina–sized stretch of Mozambican land to grow soybeans for the world.
Locals and Mozambican civil society organizations questioned the project’s basic premise: what, exactly, did Mozambicans stand to gain from ceding control of vast tracts of productive land to Brazilian agribusiness? Why not boost technical assistance and financial support for the farmers who were already there? Fierce opposition from groups like UNAC was buoyed by international advocacy campaigns highlighting “the largest landgrab in Africa.”11 Activists and academics alike lambasted the lack of community participation in drafting ProSAVANA’s master plan, which leaked out in bits and pieces and appeared to exclude small farmers altogether.
As Brazilian executives arranged trips to Mozambique to scope out land, press accounts confirmed the smallholders’ worst fears—that Brazilian companies expected to secure vast tracts of uninterrupted land in one of the highest-density agricultural regions in Mozambique.
“Mozambique is a Mato Grosso in the middle of Africa,” Carlos Ernesto Augustin, president of the Mato Grosso cotton producers association, told Folha de São Paulo in 2011, referring to his home province in Brazil, a commodity farming powerhouse.12 “The price of land there is too good to ignore.”13
“Mozambique has enormous areas available for agriculture,” Charles Hefner, head of GV Agro, the group coordinating Brazilian investments, told a São Paulo weekly when he returned from a trip to the Nacala corridor. Hefner said investors planned to target “abandoned areas,” where no agriculture was practiced. “There’s space for mega-projects of 30 or 40,000 hectares without major social impacts,” he said.14 But Brazilian investors do not appear to be interested in ProSAVANA: a fund set up to raise $2 billion to promote agribusiness in Nampula’s Nacala corridor closed in 2015, as low commodity prices and Brazil’s own economic crisis made it a riskier bet.
Local opposition and international campaigns branding Pro-SAVANA a “landgrab,” meanwhile, pushed the Japan International Cooperation Agency, JICA, to send its team back to the drawing board. “We have changed the concept, so it is now not for big farmers but for small farmers,” a JICA spokesperson said in 2016.15
Today, ProSAVANA continues to limp along through successive planning phases as local opposition smolders. Some observers see the project’s halting fate as a major victory for the land rights movement and a sign of Frelimo’s evolving development policy. As Joseph Hanlon has noted, not a single large-scale plantation project has succeeded in Mozambique in the forty years since independence—from Frelimo’s cooperative farms in the 1980s to a litany of biofuel and feed projects promoted by international boosters and local politicians.
José Pacheco, a former governor of Cabo Delgado who became agriculture minister in 2010, began his tenure by saying “we want to do here what they did in the [Brazilian] Cerrado thirty years ago.” But the work plan Pacheco ultimately drafted for the Ministry of Agriculture called for prioritizing small and medium farms and reversing 1990s-era World Bank restrictions on locally grown seed and government support for domestic agriculture.16 Some of these measures would undoubtedly help, if only they can make it out of the ministry and into the machambas intact.
Government land ownership has been a hallmark of many of Mozambique’s peers and neighbors—one strand of the “African socialism” that took root in the early years of independence in Mozambique, Tanzania, Senegal, and many other countries.17 In a sense, nationalizing land offered a powerful way to throw off the yoke of the colonial era: to curb the wealth and influence of groups that had benefited under empire and to restore the rights of people long denied the ability to create wealth for themselves.
Less than two weeks before independence, Samora Machel, the fiery Frelimo commander who became Mozambique’s first president, made a speech in the concrete stands of a soccer field outside Beira.18
“We want to create a new Mozambique. New type of relations between people,” he said to a crowd who stood on the grass before him, calling Beira “the center of white racism.”
Beira, the port city near the crook in Mozambique’s Y-shaped map, had been a center of colonial resistance to Frelimo’s gradual march south until a cease-fire was signed less than a year earlier. With the war now won, Machel was on a monthlong victory tour, holding rallies from the “Rovuma to Maputo”—tip to tip of Mozambique.
“We know that our country is in ruins. We don’t have hospitals,” Machel boomed. “Yes or no?”19
“Yes!!” the crowd roared.
“We don’t have schools. We don’t have factories. We live without blankets in our huts. Yes or no?” he asked.
“Yes!”
But we have a chance to grow cotton. Yes or no? (Yes). We live on drinking hot water all the time, to avoid stomach ache and stomach disturbances because we have no rice, because we have no corn at home. The fields are occupied. Yes or no? (Yes). They are properties. Here in Mozambique, there is no land for so-and-so, there is no land for the people, here! . . .
So, it’s only FRELIMO that will i
ndicate where each one of us will produce. We didn’t die to create private farms, private properties here in Mozambique. Above all, the land, the land belongs to mankind, to the people. It isn’t anybody’s. Do you hear? (We hear).
To read Mozambique’s 1997 land law is to see some of this revolutionary spirit on paper. It asserts the right of equal access to land for men and women, and the authority of rural communities to participate in awarding land titles, resolving disputes, and managing natural resources.20
It places a “community consultation” at the center of the process for awarding title to investors. But the concept of community consultations is squishy, and the process for allocating land is often comically lopsided. Like anything with the potential to constrain profit, the noblest parts of the law—the requirement for community input, say—can be difficult to enforce and tempting to ignore.
One of the law’s primary goals has been to insulate land distribution from the pressures of the market. In practice, the law hasn’t removed market forces so much as distorted them, placing the levers of supply and demand in the hands of a powerful set of gatekeepers. The result is a kind of paradox: land cannot be bought or sold, yet profit remains the driving force behind a huge share of land transactions.
This is true even where money is not directly involved. As in ruby-rich Montepuez, or in Catembe, a suburb that will soon be connected to Maputo by a bridge, the prospect of a return on investment is what drives interest in a given slice of the map. Yet the prohibition on buying or selling means that even with a clearly valuable piece of land, the people with the most to lose often don’t get a full seat at the negotiating table. The transaction is not between the people who want the land and the people who already live there, but between the people who want the land and the public officials who can deliver it to them. Far from Machel’s message of liberation, the net effect of Frelimo’s land policies has often been to carry forward some of the very injustices the party aimed to upend.
Nova Algodoeira’s land forms a gentle slope on the south side of the Rio Namilepe, an undulating, shallow river that gives the community its name and forms the boundary between Nampula and Zambezia—Mozambique’s most populous and most agriculturally productive provinces.
When I visited, in February 2016, the whole tract was planted in a single massive field, with rows hundreds of yards long, and pink and white cotton blossoms beginning to unfurl in a sea of green.
Until 2013, some thirty families kept their homes and raised corn and vegetables in the parcel where Nova Algodoeira now grows cotton. The land is some of the best around, nearly seven hundred acres of dark, loamy earth, loose to the touch and free of stones.
To the north, across the river, half-bald inselbergs covered with tufts of forest rise from a landscape of gentle hills and shallow valleys. To the west, the county seat is a full day’s bicycle ride—or, more commonly today, a couple of hours’ motorcycle ride—away.
I made my way to Namilepe with Damião Caixão, a fiery, barrel-chested farmer and organizer with massive hands and a silky baritone laugh. Caixão splits his time between the UNAC office in the county seat of Alto Molócue and a farm in Namilepe just downhill from Nova Algodoeira.
We left at six a.m. on what would become a scorching-hot Sunday. Caixão wore a fully zipped fisherman’s vest and jeans over a button-down and a long-sleeve T-shirt, even as he complained about the heat. “Esse calor, pa,” he said, repositioning his hat and wiping his face with a handkerchief.
Along the way, houses advertise single-item stores of sorts with front yard displays—a pile of beans and an empty tin can set out on a rice sack, or an upside-down wrapper for Safari cigarettes planted on a stick stuck in the ground. A curtain of corn and cassava gradually narrowed the roadway as we got farther from the city.
Caixão’s complaints about Nova Algodoeira began at the tail end of the trip. First, the road—he blamed the constant back-and-forth of heavy equipment for deep ruts and channels worsened by the rain—and then everything else.
People on their way home from church crisscrossed the field every which way, trampling plants underfoot without seeming to notice. Caixão laughed and explained that the company had eliminated the footpaths people used to rely on.
Late in the afternoon, Caixão and I went up the hill from his house to look for Lucas Arturo Kutula, the líder da zona, or local headman, of the community that had been displaced. Caixão pulled his tiny blue Geo Tracker to a stop on the road that cuts Nova Algodoeira’s field in two. Nearby, a woman with a baby on her back was plodding through the furrows as though she were walking on deep sand. This was Kutula’s wife, Joaquina António. Caixão called out to her in Lomué, and she disappeared beyond the field’s edge for a few minutes before returning with her husband.
“I was born here, and raised here too,” he proclaimed plaintively, “in this very field. I’ve been living here for sixty-five years, but now I’ve been kicked out.”
“They surprised us,” António added, speaking of Nova Algodoeira.
“They just came, and we didn’t know a thing about them,” the chefe said, breaking into Portuguese, as Caixão translated. “They didn’t even do a consulta comunitária!” said António.
Even in the more remote areas of Mozambique, people seem to be familiar with the basic quid pro quo of the land law: companies are required to conduct meetings, or community consultations, to tell locals about a proposal, vet conflicts, and agree on compensation or community benefits that will flow from the project.
In Namilepe, as it turned out, there had been a community consultation for that parcel of land. Back in 2008, residents had agreed to move when a school and a health clinic were promised in exchange. But that agreement was made six years before Nova Algodoeira’s arrival. In fact, it involved a different entity altogether: the Associação Acção Rural Contra a Pobreza Absoluta, or ARCOPA, an association of veterans of Mozambique’s war for independence who planned to grow corn with farming equipment donated by the government.
On the three-page agreement noting community approval for the project in Namilepe, the stretched-out cursive of a technician from the local office of economic development records the names of eight people present for the consulta comunitária, though another blank says “15” members of the community were present.
Locals placed high hopes in ARCOPA: “We hope the new investor creates a good partnership with us, as members of an association counting on more support,” one farmer said, according to the form. Damião Caixão was there, it notes, representing Lozan Farms. “We would like to see lots of initiatives like this one. We are ready to welcome you, and hope for a better partnership so that we can fight absolute poverty together,” he said.
There’s no mention of the promises ARCOPA made to people in Namilepe, and no term sheet or suggestion of what might happen if the project failed.
ARCOPA went through the process of getting a land title only to sputter and fold within the first couple of years. “They were lazy,” is how Caixão described it. Here and there, ARCOPA farmers stripped the brush from bits of their 250-hectare parcel to open new fields, but they never managed to clear and plant enough land to make the effort viable. So Kutula and his neighbors stayed on, undisturbed.
For years, locals wondered what had happened to ARCOPA and to the promised school and clinic that had never materialized. Then, much as it would happen downhill with the Associação Lozan Farms, one day in June 2013, António Regalo showed up with his tractors.
As it turned out, Nova Algodoeira hadn’t even pretended to go through the motions of obtaining a DUAT legally. Instead of approaching the government to initiate a new investment proposal, the company simply paid ARCOPA to take the reins of its failed project. Regalo freely admitted as much. “We got the land, started working it, and ‘pronto!’” he’d told me.
Regalo and his employees began at the high end of the parcel, using an excavator to remove trees and set them in piles to burn, grading the area with a
tractor as it was cleared, stopping work only when he reached a garden or a house.
The líder da zona, or headman, Lucas Arturo Kutula, right, stands in Nova Algodoeira’s six-hundred-acre cotton field in Namilepe with some of his neighbors, who say the company forced them out and bulldozed their homes.
As Caixão and I spoke with Kutula and António, our conversation gradually drew a peanut gallery of fifteen or twenty people who seemed to materialize out of nowhere into the deserted expanse of cotton all around us. Women walking with canes or with children strapped to their chests, men with sacks slung over their shoulders, people who might have been on their way to a relative’s house or simply strolling in the shade of mango trees on the edge of the field. One by one, the curious set down their things and squinted in the sun, listening, until the school director, Castelo Xavier Mutupa, who stood leaning against his bicycle, broke in to help the couple tell the story.
It turned out that these were the líder’s former neighbors, some of the many who had lived in the cotton field where we now stood.
“He came with his machine ready,” the school director broke in, in rapid-fire Lomué.
“And there you were working your land. He’d say, ‘Senhor, you have to leave here’ . . . with his máquina behind him,” the school director said, switching for a moment to Portuguese.
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