“But here in the bush, a person can change palhotas, he starts growing somewhere else, his trees are abandoned, his trees are burned, because it doesn’t belong to him: his land isn’t limited.”
Regalo’s gripe goes to the heart of a central question of land tenure in Mozambique (and anywhere else where land is held in common, or without title): what does it mean for land to be “available”?
The dominant form of farming in Mozambique uses no tractors, no animals, no fertilizer, no pesticides, and no irrigation—nothing Regalo might recognize as farming. The vast majority of farmers have no access to credit to buy seed or inputs ahead of time. They grow food with a machete, a hoe, and very little else. Accordingly, a large chunk of small farms in Mozambique don’t grow enough food for the families who run them.31
Most small farmers shift their growing areas periodically, letting fields go fallow for years at a time to restore the soil. And while the average size of these subsistence farms is small—about the size of two football fields—keeping the farm productive year after year often requires alternating with an equivalent area of fallow land.
Should that fallow land be considered “free and unoccupied,” as the land law requires for it to be leased to outside investors?32 What about the vast hillsides and tracts of scrubby savannah used for grazing goats and cattle? Or the miombo woods and ironwood and mahogany forests where people hunt and collect plants for construction, medicine, food, and handicrafts?
There’s a wide range of opinion on just how big a pie investors and rural Mozambicans have to share in the country’s fields, grassland, and forests not part of national parks or other government lands. Estimates run from 12 to 19 million hectares, or, roughly, from an area a little bigger than Maine to one that would cover all of New England.33
But for a time, at the peak of Mozambique’s economic expansion in the 2000s, land deals seemed to track with Regalo’s view of a resource that “isn’t limited.” In a six-year period starting in 2004, the government granted investors concessions covering close to 2.5 million hectares.34 That’s nearly half the area used by Mozambique’s smallholders—some two out of every three families in the country.35
Land deals made at that breakneck pace laid bare the weak process in place to safeguard community rights, along with incoherent aspects of the land law itself. Concessions given to investors overlapped with parcels already delimited as “community” land.36 Conflicts sprouted by the hundreds.37 Eventually, in 2009, the government imposed a moratorium on concessions over a thousand hectares, which lasted until 2011.38
Yet government officials have continued to appear in many transactions not as impartial arbiters or advocates, but as the cheerleaders and even bedfellows of powerful people seeking land. In spite of its progressive roots, the land law offers only vague answers on key questions of process. The fragility of the Mozambican state and the lack of education in the countryside have often combined with tragic consequences for communities that rely on the land for their livelihoods.39
The District Directorate of Agriculture in Alto Molócue is on the west side of town. When I visited in February 2016, a bad flood had washed out a bridge over the Molócue River the year before, separating half the city and a number of government buildings from the main highway and commercial downtown.40 Cars had to take a several-mile detour to meet their passengers on the other side. Motorcycles made their way over an improvised plank crossing just inches above the water level.
Just twenty feet downstream, the open jaws of the original bridge framed a cascade of muddy water as construction workers stood on the banks.
I crossed over the bridge’s unfinished replacement in a stream of pedestrians who casually ignored logs placed at either end to prevent anyone crossing.
Leandro Marcos, a UNAC colleague of Caixão’s who had come with us to Namilepe, was waiting on the other side. Marcos, a lanky, moon-faced agronomist with a nasal voice, had arranged a meeting for me with the district director of agriculture, Argenio Candua, and he spent much of the bumpy ride home eagerly coaching me on how to approach the interview.
“‘Senhor Director, I just want to talk about the agricultural economy here, the level of development,’” he suggested. “Start with general questions.
“There’s not a question he won’t answer,” Marcos continued, smiling. “He’ll answer every single thing you have to ask him—he’ll just lie.” Marcos urged me, for his own sake, not to let the director know I’d been with UNAC to Namilepe already. “He’ll say, ‘I’m the boss, how could you bring visitors around my district without coming to see me first?’”
“I don’t need to tell him everything,” I countered, “but I can’t lie to him.” It wouldn’t be worthwhile, I thought, to recount much of what the director had to say about land conflicts in his district if I couldn’t ask questions or write about the visit to Namilepe.
“Não, não, não, não!” Marcos protested gamely. “In the book, say everything. Everything,” he insisted. “Don’t hold back. Just tomorrow . . .”
When we got up the hill, we were told the director hadn’t come in yet. Marcos ran out to cash a check at the bank, and I took a seat on the concrete wall that bordered the property. Forty-five minutes later, an assistant ushered us into a mint-green office that felt, as the rest of Alto Molócue climbed into the nineties, like a walk-in refrigerator. Once upon a time, this building had been part of the colonial administration, and it was obvious that it was being gradually reclaimed from the decay of the war years.
Trails of delicate rosettes swooped and curled up the walls and across the ceiling, showing where vines that once grew inside the building had been pulled down. Cabinets on one end, battered and missing fixtures, had received a new coat of brown paint.
Yawning, the director waved us in and scolded Marcos for leaving to run an errand while I waited for the meeting to start. “We agreed on eight thirty,” he said sharply. “You came and then you left your guest here. You can’t do things that way.”
(“He’s a boss,” Leandro said with a shrug when I asked him about the reprimand later. “He has to talk that way, to show he’s a boss.”)
Candua spoke in a low monotone and yawned throughout our meeting, but I found him more candid than I’d expected after Marcos’s disclaimer.
Frelimo’s stated land policies have taken a turn in recent years. Low commodity prices, popular pressure, and the evolving views of donor organizations have hastened a shift away from megaprojects and toward a development agenda that puts more emphasis on small and midsized commercial farms. For the time being, these farms number well under a hundred thousand, out of close to 4 million nationwide.41 The vast majority of Mozambican farmers aren’t able to grow enough food to support their families throughout the year; to bridge the gap, they toil at the margins of the cash economy selling firewood and charcoal, or doing day labor known as ganho ganho.42
“Many producers in the family sector participate in the market in a highly unfavourable way: selling quickly after harvest for very low prices, then returning to buy the same products during the hunger period, but at very high prices,” reports the Strategic Plan for Development of the Agriculture Sector, a government plan meant to guide farming policy for 2011–20.43
“More than 90 percent of Alto Molócue’s producers grow crops primarily for their own consumption,” Candua said. “We’re trying to help more producers participate in the whole supply chain—not just production, but getting things to market, and if possible, processing.”
For this strategy to succeed, the land law will need to work better than it has in the past. Investors, naturally, are most interested in land with the same characteristics that make it desirable to Mozambican farmers: soil quality, access to water and roads. Enticed by pitches promising rapid expansion and a slice of future profits, the government has not often been willing to say no to foreigners in order to support what the researchers Teresa Smart and Joseph Hanlon call “emergent” farmers.44 But the g
ains from closer management of these family-owned commercial farms—familiarity with the land, close relationships with the people providing the labor, mixed cropping, and willingness to experiment—can actually outweigh the economies of scale of a giant farm and leave much more of the profit to filter into the local economy.45
“The land law isn’t finished,” Candua said. “It’s not a perfect document: it’s evolving.” Candua thought people were working on “corrections” in the legislature and in the Ministry of Agriculture. The most significant change in recent years has been to require two meetings, rather than one, for community consultations—one to map out the land in question and another to seek community approval.
As the national director of agriculture, Rafik Valá, told the sociologist João Feijó in a recent book of interviews, the problem with the way resettlement has often been done is that “there was no vision of what we wanted for the [affected] population.”46
“You can’t compensate someone by saying ‘how much did you produce last year?’ ‘This many hectares.’ ‘Okay, take this, look, you can have 7,000 meticais,’” Valá said. “You have to consider his whole life.” The government had had some missed opportunities to level the scales between communities and investors, he acknowledged. But he also bristled at criticism of community consultations by groups like UNAC. When you hear an old farmer speak out, he said, “You can see he’s being used. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, because he’s been convinced to say certain things.”47 Of course, that description also sounds a lot like the community consultation held in Namilepe.
An imperfect land law—even one marred by poor record keeping, power imbalances, and, sometimes, unseemly arrangements with local officials, as the sociologist Madeleine Fairbairn has pointed out—is probably better than none at all. Without it, Fairbairn reasons, Mozambique’s postwar boom years might have brought “an unbridled scramble for land” with little to stand in its way.48
But there are still glaring omissions. “There’s no legal mechanism, as it stands, for someone to advocate for the camponês”—or peasant, Candua, Alto Molócue’s district director of agriculture, said. “Only the local government.”
“District administrators retain a central role,” writes Joseph Hanlon, “and are often caught in the middle.”49 “On one hand, many want to support their local communities, and would like to defend communities in conflict with would-be investors. On the other hand, district administrations often receive mobile telephone calls from senior party people, at the provincial or national level, saying ‘find land for X,’ who may simply be the relative of someone important in Frelimo, or who may be a serious investor.”
There is also no specific standard for what constitutes community approval. Five people? Ten people? Five hundred people? Which people? On what conditions?
On these questions, “The law isn’t clear,” Candua said. In spite of the requirement for two or more meetings, community consultations for an area the size Regalo occupied often take place in a single, brief encounter, with no opportunity for communities to engage in meaningful deliberation or inform people who are not present before they sign off.50
Typically, Candua said, advance notice is sent through the chefe da localidade or posto administrativo—the most local levels of government. Representatives for the business seeking land arrive along-side officials from the district or provincial government and pass out a “goodwill” payment of 300 or 500 meticais (depending on the project) to be shared among community members in attendance.51
“It’s natural to say the community, which has far less experience and knowledge in these things, is influenced to give answers in favor of the business,” Candua said. “They don’t get a period to analyze, how exactly is this going to be? And there’s no one there, no documents to tell them, ‘Okay, this is what’s possible,’ so they could look and say, ‘This is how this program is going to benefit us.’ That doesn’t exist, so most of the time, it culminates in this kind of sudden, improvised answer, which is, ‘No, we can! We want the business here.’ But our current framework looks at that as a legally binding contract,” he said, whether or not community representatives seem to understand it.52
After Candua and I were done speaking, Afonso João Colaço, a gracious, cheerful technician who oversees survey work for land deals in Alto Molócue, walked me down the hallway to the office where he maintains copies of hundreds of DUATs and completed community consultation forms arranged in chronological order.
Colaço lifted a thick white binder onto the counter and took his seat on the other side. The paperwork for each consultation ran to only a couple of pages, leaving much of the process to the imagination. As has been noted in other parts of the country, participants are given a half dozen handwritten lines to outline any objections or concerns over a proposed project.53
In many cases, the signatures of people listed as “camponês”—peasants or smallholders—are scratched out in the tentative scrawl of someone who barely knows how to write. Some lists of community signatures are all spelled out in the same hand, presumably because some of the people “signing” can’t read or write at all.
Concessions covering thousands of hectares were approved by tiny minorities of the people living within them: in one case, investors secured a timber concession nearly twice the size of Manhattan with the presence of twenty-five people from the surrounding communities.
One section of the form reads: “At the end of the meeting, this consultation contract was read in Portuguese and translated into _______ (local language).”
There is no space to lay out a project’s scope or requirements beyond simple acreage, and there’s nowhere to record what investors promise in return for cooperation from the locals, so that they might be held accountable for it later.
In theory, communities have the option to decline projects on their land for any reason at all. DUATs awarded to foreign investors can also be revoked after two years if they don’t follow through on their development plan for the parcel. But neither Colaço nor Candua could recall an instance of either happening in Alto Molócue.
“They didn’t even do a consulta comunitária,” Joaquina António had complained, standing beside her husband in the cotton field. But the unfairness of their situation didn’t necessarily strike them as being illegal. They’d never lived in a system where their land rights could be reliably asserted over those of outsiders.
“If you go there and ask people, ‘Who do these fields belong to?’ they’ll say ‘ARCOPA, Nova Algodoeira,’” Colaço said. “But if you come here, there’s nothing that shows that’s true.”
Colaço said he’d visited Namilepe recently on other business—the most common disputes he’s called to resolve are between family members after the death of a relative—and stopped to take stock of the situation with Nova Algodoeira.
He’d heard the company was going through a process with the provincial government to put ARCOPA’s parcel into its name, but even that didn’t match up with the reality. “The land that was measured out” for ARCOPA, Colaço said, “is not the parcel that’s being cultivated.”
Even so, the people in Namilepe seemed at a loss for how to resolve their situation. They said no one from the district government had been out to see them in more than two years, long enough that the top official in the area, the district administrator, had been transferred elsewhere.
Marques Dias, one of the UNAC activists who’d stopped Nova Algodoeira’s incursions on his own fields, explained it this way: “[The administrator’s] approach was always to boost morale for the population. He didn’t say anything bad. Just ‘I’m going to resolve your problem.’ Then, when he left, nothing happened. He never said anything bad. He didn’t speak very much. But they were always waiting for a favorable answer that didn’t come.”
“And people never went to town to follow up?” I asked.
Dias shook his head emphatically. “Noooooooo—now, the person who could have accompanied them to d
o that is the régulo himself,” he explained—the traditional headman. “But the régulo was eating his piece too. And when he’s eating his share, there’s no way.”
For people who are accustomed to walking into the DMV or the county assessor’s office in a tank top and sandals, say, and demanding prompt and responsive service, this scenario is difficult to imagine. How could it be that people would allow their homes to be usurped without making a thirty-mile trip to protest or demand answers from their government?
Dias laughed. “People here, the first thing they do is respect the proprio régulo. I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it. You can’t do it.” He paused. “For us, to contradict the régulo?” He trailed off. It was simply inconceivable.
I’d tried to ask the same question of the people in Namilepe, prompting Caixão to launch into an animated exchange that sent ripples of laughter through the group until I interjected to ask for translation.
“We were talking about the story of some monkeys,” he said. “Two monkeys were together and they went to a third, saying, we want to divvy up our cake. The [third monkey] had a scale so you could weigh out equal parts. So he said, ‘Fine, cut your cake in half and put it on the scale.’ When it was heavier on one side, he’d cut a little bit off that side and put it in his mouth. Then the other side would be heavier, so he’d cut a bit from that side and put that in his mouth. By the time the scale was balanced, the cake was gone, and the two monkeys didn’t get to eat their cake. That’s the way it is here: the régulo said, ‘Calma, calma, calma—a gente vai resolver a vossa problema.’ But when Mr. Regalo comes [with his cotton company] and says, ‘Look, Régulo, here’s a bit of wine,’ he takes it. . . . Then, the time passes and the people are the ones who lose out.”
Here, Castelo Mutupa, the short, wiry principal of the school in Nova Algodoeira’s fields—now conducted, he said, under a mango tree—broke in. “Once the régulo says, ‘Wait for me to resolve this problem,’ there’s not much thought of going around him.”
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