An aerial view of Arimba, Mozambique, 2021. Photo by Dimitry B.

Between Flood and Famine

In Mozambique, the green transition comes up against corruption and imperialism

Mozambique – a south-eastern African country that borders South Africa, Eswatini, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania – is under siege from climate catastrophes. Violent cyclones, floods, and devastating droughts are ravaging the country.

Millions of its inhabitants have been badly affected. Some farmers have been left with little or no food, and some residents have had their homes and businesses destroyed. Every part of the country has been wrecked by one climate disaster or another. The droughts have annihilated summer food crops, while the cyclones have flattened some parts of coastal cities. Sources of livelihoods in both urban and rural areas have been affected.

But even with limited funding, efforts are underway – mostly backed by nongovernmental organizations – to make Mozambique resilient to climate shocks. One city, Beira, has gone so far as to draw a master plan for making itself resilient to climate-related calamities. At the same time, various resiliency measures have been started in different parts of the country – from agroforestry, to conservation farming and rescuing of drought-resistant native crops, to building sea walls and better drainage, to reviving mangrove forests. 

Unfortunately, financial problems are obstructing these resiliency initiatives. 

A house with a gaping hole ravaged by a storm in Beira, Mozambique. A makeshift seawall is has been built on the beach. Photo by Andrew Mambondiyani.

Though Mozambique, like many African countries, does not contribute much to global climate change through high carbon emissions, the country remains one of the most vulnerable to climate disasters. But the recent discovery of oil and gas has left the country in a dilemma. Will Mozambique be in support of phasing out fossil fuels in the near future before fully benefiting from its large reserves? Mozambique’s main exports are coal and petroleum, which all contribute to greenhouse emissions. Experts say while global mitigation efforts would be positive for the country because they would help limit the impact of the physical risks from climate change, the implications of a global transition to a low-carbon economy may pose more immediate risks to Mozambique.

Mozambique has decentralised climate adaptation and resilience strategy through a series of Local Adaptation Plans (LAPs), and these will inform the ongoing development of the central government’s National Adaptation Plan (NAP). Though Mozambique has received more than $25 million from Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, the European Union, and the Region of Catalonia to be channeled to local governments for locally led climate adaptation, lack of technical capacity and funding are the major drawbacks for the implementation of the plan.

But the current impacts of climate change in Mozambique are everywhere for all to see.

Several houses in Mozambique’s Beira city along the Indian Ocean coast stand visibly battered and abandoned; some have their roofs blown off while others have huge gaping holes in the walls. 

These desolate houses are depressing remnants of severe cyclones, storms, and flooding that have been pummelling the city every summer season. Many more coastal cities in Mozambique – including the capital Maputo – have also been overwhelmed by similar natural disasters and coastal erosion.

In recent years, the summer season in Mozambique has brought mixed emotions among residents. On one hand, summer is a season of bliss for farmers, as it occasionally brings plenty of food. But now the summer season also brings anxiety and fear among residents, what with cyclones and floods becoming more frequent and severe than ever. Mozambique  has a coastline that stretches for up to 2,700 kilometres. That makes the country especially  vulnerable to natural disasters and coastal erosion in an age when climate change is making these more common all across the world. 

While the country’s coastal communities and cities have suffered from getting too much water, the inland regions have suffered from getting too little. Severe droughts driven by climate change are wiping out rain-fed crops, leaving millions of poor people without enough food. This year, a brutal El Niño  – the strongest on record –  has affected southern and central Mozambique. The same El Niño drought has severely affected Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. At the same time, other extreme weather events such as Tropical Storm Filipo and severe floods have left millions of people in Mozambique on the brink of starvation. Worse still, many people in the country have not yet recovered from the devastating effects of previous cyclones like Freddy (2023), Cheneso (2023), Jasmine (2022), Gombe (2022), Ana (2022), Jobo (2021), Chalane (2020), Kenneth (2019) and Idai (2019).

And as climate disasters are becoming persistent and ruthless, many people in Mozambique are now trapped between a rock and a hard place. While more and more people from the coasts are being displaced by climate disasters, the drought-stricken inland regions to which the refugees are migrating have less and less food to feed their growing population. Some experts have recommended the population transfers nonetheless, as the country lacks the financial resources to fully implement climate resilience programmes like rich cities in developed countries. For while various developed countries are facing similar sea level rises, they are better prepared to mitigate the impacts. A recent report reveals that the U.S. needs up to $416 billion by 2040 to build seawalls to defend its coastal residents. This isn’t an option for Mozambique. But neither, in the end, is a refugee crisis in the middle of a famine – which is where things could end up if current trends continue.  

“The future does not look good for us. Almost every year we are now experiencing several devastating cyclones and storms. It was not like this a few years ago,” Alberto Luiz, a resident of Mozambique’s Beira city told me dejectedly. But Luiz defiantly adds that he is not planning to move from the coastal city any time soon. Just like millions of people living in coastal areas in Mozambique, Luiz’s life depends entirely on the sea. 

“I depend on selling fish; fishing is my source of livelihood. I will not go anywhere,” he adds.

The abandoned boats of fishermen in Beira, Mozambique. Photo by Andrew Mambondiyani.

Beira  – Mozambique’s second-largest city and capital of Sofala province – has some areas below sea level and is practically sinking. The weather is becoming more severe, inundating the city. And many other cities along Mozambique’s coast aren’t spared either. With sixty percent of Mozambique’s population living in these low-lying coastal areas, it’s no surprise sea-level rise and frequent intense weather events are threatening communities, homes, and businesses. Life is becoming more unbearable with each passing season. 

Mozambique attained independence from Portugal in 1975 but was rocked by a civil war instigated by the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO), an anti-communist paramilitary outfit sponsored by the Central Intelligence Organisation of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). These rebels fought against the country’s ruling Marxist-Leninist party, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO). The civil war ended in 1992, but its legacy lives on in the underdevelopment of Mozambique’s postcolonial economy. Poor city planning coupled with obsolete infrastructure – some of which was built before the country’s independence – make its coastal cities prone to severe weather events. 

However, even with a plethora of climate-related challenges bedevilling them, these cities still play a critical role in the economic growth of not only Mozambique itself  but the Southern Africa region at large. Neighboring land-locked countries –  Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, and Malawi – depend on Mozambican ports like Beira and Maputo as gateways to the sea. One sign of the Mozambican coast’s strategic importance is the tripartite agreement signed by Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mozambican president Filipe Nyusi, and Botswana’s president Mokgweetsi Masisi this July on the new Techobanine deepwater port, which will handle increasing traffic from Zimbabwe and Botswana. The proposed new port will be constructed in Mozambique’s Matutuíne district along with a new 1,700km railway line linking Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Botswana – all at a cost of about $6.5 billion.

But this ambitious plan to bring a new prosperity to the region will be for nought if the coastline ends up submerged and abandoned as a result of climate disaster.

~

In 2016 Daviz Mbepo Simango, the former mayor of Beira, told me that millions of dollars are required to address the problems related to floods and rising sea level in that city. 

The Dutch engineering firm Deltares along with several other private companies  –  Witteveen +Bos, Wissing, Niras Mozambique and VandenBroek Consulting – collaborated with the city to draw up the Beira Master Plan 2035. The master plan is a program designed to revamp the city’s water management infrastructure and enhance urban renewal. This ambitious scheme, if fully implemented, could make the city resilient to current and future climate shocks. Beira is learning from the Netherlands, where over 1,800 people were killed by floods and many more were forced to migrate in 1953. After these floods, the Netherlands adopted the Delta Plan, which helped to manage flood prevention and water resources management. 

In 2019, I toured various institutions and companies in the Netherlands on the invitation of the Haarlem-Mutare City Link to learn and observe firsthand how the country is successfully managing floods and water resources. After the deaths from the 1953 devastating floods in the Netherlands, the country vowed that “this will never happen again,” said a senior official at Deltares, the company that helped to draw the Beira Master Plan 2035. 

But will Beira and other Mozambican cities be able to manage floods like Dutch cities?

“Estimates [of what it would take to fully implement the Beira Master Plan] add up to more than more than US$100 million. The number of people who can be affected during flooding is about 120,000 inhabitants,” Simango says.

However, this price tag is huge for a city like Beira –  a city much of whose population unfortunately lives in low areas where the drainage conditions are especially bad. In some parts of Beira water-borne diseases such as malaria, and at times cholera, continue to pose serious threats to the city’s residents. At the same time, the flooding and cyclones damage properties thereby affecting economic activities in the city. 

Though the current mayor of Beira, Albano Carige, did not respond to an email request for updates on progress in the implementation of the master plan, according to the former mayor various activities are ongoing to improve the city. He says the existing drainage situation is improved through a World Bank-funded rehabilitation project. The city is also creating a green infrastructure as well as an additional outlet of the drainage system to the sea.

Many houses in Beira, Mozambique, are poorly built and cannot withstand severe weather. Photo by Andrew Mambondiyani.

“An old lagoon is converted into a retention area where urbanization is combined with recreational and ecological development. The future extension areas of Beira have been planned in higher situated areas of the city where risks of sea level rise are less and where better drainage facilities are part of the integral planning of new urbanized areas,” Simango told me.  The retention area will act as flood proofing, at the same time creating space for the construction of recreational facilities for the city. This will combine buildings and vegetation to create a microclimate which will also reduce air pollution in the city. 

Sadly, Simango  – who was mayor of Beira since 2003 – died of COVID-19 in 2021 before the whole master plan came to fruition. Time will tell whether the current mayor will successfully implement the plan.

In March of this year, the government of Mozambique kick-started a process to draft regulation for urban disaster risk management and climate resilience. This initiative spearheaded by the country’s National Institute for Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (INGD) has technical support from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and funding from the Adaptation Fund. At the official launch of the process in Maputo, INGD vice president Belém Monteiro and Jadwiga Massinga, National Director of Climate Change for the Ministry of Land and Environment, both expressed support for urgent new policies in both Mozambique’s cities (where 30% of its population lives) and its countryside. But having an urban disaster risk management and climate resilience regulation is not enough. Funding for climate resilience in Mozambique remains one of the biggest challenges. To achieve climate resilience of Mozambique’s human, physical, and natural capital, the country needs up to US$37.2 billion in investment between now and 2030, according to the World Bank Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) released in December last year. This is quite a substantial amount, considering that today Mozambique’s  GDP stands at $22.98 billion and is only expected to rise to $38.92 billion by 2029. With a current population of around 35 million , Mozambique’s entire 2024 national budget is only $8.5 billion. 

After the World Bank CCDR report was released, World Bank officials emphasized how certain policy reforms would help Mozambique to unlock private investments for projects that would strengthen the country’s resilience to climate shocks and support sustainable economic growth. One was quoted speaking of “the private sector’s increasingly important role in helping Mozambique address its climate change challenges and supporting the country’s growth and transition towards a low-carbon economy.”

But questions remain. After all, one might wonder: how, with the vast resources that lay within its territory – timber, natural gas, coal, graphite, iron ore, titanium, apatite, marble, bentonite, bauxite, kaolin, copper, gold, rubies and tantalum –  is Mozambique still struggling to fund its climate resilience programs? The country’s economy is anchored on the extractives with up to 180 million cubic feet of natural gas reserves, the third largest in Africa. The country also has among the largest reserves of coal on the continent, most of which is exported to India.

True, there may be inherent limits to the growth possibilities of an economy that does not “move up the value chain” – that is, an economy based on exporting raw materials like those listed above rather than high value-added manufactured goods. But putting that aside, another question arises: what about the money Mozambique does already make from its mineral and energy exports – where is it all going? 

A mix of economic mismanagement, corruption, and the Islamic State (ISIS) insurgency have greatly affected the country. In 2016, Mozambique was blighted by a scandal involving secret loans or “hidden debt” amounting to about $2 billion USD. The money – clandestinely secured from various European and Russian banks with government guarantees – was meant for state fishery projects. It ultimately resulted in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) withdrawing its own loans to the country, since from its point of view Mozambique was far less creditworthy than it had initially let on in light of its secret debts. This previously unreported external borrowing was only revealed when the government was in talks to restructure the loan it took to finance the Mozambique Tuna Company. 

The World Bank said the undisclosed non-concessional borrowing – contracted by the government between 2009 and 2014 – was equivalent to 10% of Mozambique’s GDP. This scandal triggered a chain of events: with the withdrawal of IMF loans Mozambique’s inflation rose;1In the wake of the IMF withdrawing its loans, the exchange rate of the Mozambican metical to the US dollar (how many of the former you need to have one of the latter) nearly doubled in 2014. This in turn more or less doubled the price of imports overnight. In a country whose top imports include certain fuels and other raw materials, machines for industry and energy production, chemicals, and basic food staples (in other words, key ingredients to numerous domestic industries), this would reverberate through nearly all its major supply chains as sudden cost increases – which, given these would persist and not go away any time soon, would reverberate down those supply chains as price increases across the economy, the more precise term for what economists loosely call inflation. Here once again, in our view, is confirmation of the Supply Chain Theory of Inflation, first articulated so eloquently in Issue One. See Steve Mann, “Notes Toward a Theory of Inflation” in Strange Matters Issue One (Summer 2022). –Eds. fiscal space shrank; average annual economic growth dwindled from 7.7% between 2000 and 2016 to 3.3% between 2016 and 2019; and foreign direct investment dried up as investors lost confidence;. Mozambique’s debt spiralled from 61% of GDP in 2016 to 104% in 2018; and the country defaulted on its debt in 2016. 

There has been some modestly good news recently, though. In July, the Mozambican government revealed that it was going to pay creditors, including VTB Capital Plc and Banco Comercial Português S.A., $220 million in a settlement as part of the “hidden loan” scandal that ended in default. A hefty price to be sure, but not as high as it could have been: factoring in interest rates that accrued over the years, the claims from the lenders had ballooned to $1.4 billion, according to a joint statement by Mozambique’s Finance Ministry and attorney general. Last year, similar payment deals were secured between the government and another group of creditors which included UBS Group AG’s Credit Suisse. The deals have managed to remove up to $2.3 billion in loans from state accounts, according to the Mozambican Finance Ministry. But when the country’s starting point this year was some $10 billion in external debt, even this relief leaves a long way to go.

Besides the “hidden debt” scandal, an ISIS insurgency has been tearing down Mozambique’s northern province of Cabo Delgado since 2017; more than 4,000 people have been killed and up to 940,000 displaced. And a criminal network involving ISIS has been smuggling rosewood timber worth millions of dollars to China each year to fund the insurgency, according to the BBC quoting an Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) report. Mozambique spends an estimated around $150 million a year on its military, though some journalists note the government’s lack of financial transparency may mean that amount is higher.

With its traditional lenders retreating in the wake of the “hidden loans” scandal, Mozambique is more reliant than ever on whatever aid it can get. The US  government has stepped into this breach, committing considerable resources to its partnership with Mozambique: in April 2022, US President Joe Biden chose Mozambique as a focus country for the Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability, donating up to $50 million to support stabilization in the country.. At $560 million in assistance overall to Mozambique per year, the US remains the largest bilateral donor to the country. These funds support climate resilience, disaster response, water and sanitation, vocational training, and children’s literacy among others. 

But is there a catch to this U.S. support to Mozambique? Much of Mozambique’s foreign debt is owned by the World Bank, where the US and its allies have significant influence. Much of the rest is hard to trace, but recent reports indicate that over 20% of it is owned by a combination of China (a US rival) and Portugal (a US ally). Hence, while it’s difficult from public pronouncements to know for certain, there is a high probability that US support has geostrategic motives. In the bigger picture, the US appears to be shoring up its power and influence in Africa, with a strong presence in Zambia, Malawi, and Botswana – quite possibly to counter or forestall the activities of China and Russia in the region. It remains to be seen just how much these great powers will demand of their African partners as their rivalries with one another escalate.

At any rate, with so much of Mozambique’s wealth being funneled into the war effort, debt service to foreign creditors, or various other pockets, its green transition seems uncertain at best. With each passing year, the $37.2 billion investment target for climate resiliency and risk management seems to slip further away.

~

Nevertheless, even if there’s no money for it, climate adaptation simply cannot wait. According to Christopher Ihinegbu, a climate change expert in Africa, the disaster riskscape in Mozambique spells severe consequences for people;:the repleteness of floods, cyclones, rising sea levels in the coastal areas, and droughts inland might cause the number of climate refugees in the country to skyrocket. 

“However, this unique risk pattern can also provide opportunities for transformation and adaptation,” Ihinegbu told me.By encouraging farmers to plant drought-resistant crops and trees, and channeling the coastal advantage to create artificial lakes and swamps that fight inland droughts, Mozambique can significantly mitigate the impact of climate change upon its population. 

“By doing so, coastal flood risks can be tackled and rechanneled into drylands, where it is needed. Nature-based solutions like mangrove planting can be employed along the coasts to attenuate the impacts of cyclones, coastal floods, and rising sea levels,” Ihinegbu says.

Some of this is already happening. To revive the dwindling mangroves, a United Arab Emirates-based company, Blue Forest, is working with the Mozambican government to harness artificial intelligence and other technological advancements to restore the forests. This ambitious and aggressive mangrove reforestation project will see up to 100 million mangroves being planted on a total area of 185,000 hectares over the next 30 years. The project – which promises to offset approximately 200,000 tons of CO2 annually, the equivalent of 50,000 cars off the road – will focus on the country’s Sofala and Zambezia provinces, which are biodiversity-sensitive, according to Blue Forest.

After the launch of the project, Stephen Fadeyi – director of Water and Forestry at Blue Forest – told me that mangroves serve as protection or defense of the battered coastal area. 

“The coastline of Mozambique experiences regular cyclones and turbulent water waves. The mangroves, however, help to reduce the wave strength thereby limiting the tendencies of coastal erosion and destruction of livelihoods or properties along the coastal line,” Fadeyi says.

It’s worth noting, however, that similar UAE-led projects have sometimes been severely criticized by international reporters.2In this connection, while there aren’t any published critiques of Blue Forest, another UAE-owned company with a similar name and mission (Blue Carbon) has come under severe criticism in the Western press for using cedar-planting as an excuse for land grabs and greenwashing. See Patrick Greenfield & Lorenzo Tondo, “Who is the UAE sheikh behind deals to manage vast areas of African forest?” (30 November 2023) and Patrick Greenfield, “The new ‘scramble for Africa’: how a UAE sheikh quietly made carbon deals for forests bigger than UK” (30 November 2023) in The Guardian. This suggests a need for caution in assessing the claims of such companies.

Bernardo Ribeiro de Almeida, another climate change expert and assistant professor at the Leiden University College and the Van Vollenhoven Institute in the Netherlands, agrees with Ihinegbu, adding that it is quite important that climate-related responses are designed in close collaboration with the people on the ground and taking into consideration their various interests and needs. 

“The risk of climate-related disasters must be considered in line with other risks [like] loss of livelihoods and top-down solutions tend to become a source of grievances and even more problems. One-size-fits-all solutions or imposed draconian measures are not the way of dealing with these issues,” says Almeida, who has done extensive climate change research in Mozambique.

Pedro Zorrilla Miras, a climate change campaigner with Greenpeace Spain – who has also done studies on the impacts of droughts in Mozambique  – says farmers in the country are in a very difficult situation, with very high essential needs. 

“They need better infrastructures [like] roads, electricity, internet connection, water and irrigation. They also need a better education system. Only in the long term, these needs will be overcome,” Miras says.

Catembe, Mozambique, 2024. Image by Omoniyi David.

He says the farmers could benefit from solar panels and with help from the government, a huge proportion of the population could have access to electricity in a short period of time. 

“It would be affordable for the farmers with help from the government. They also need mechanization of the farming activities. Also an increase of other economic activities could benefit the country, e.g. in tourism and industry,” he says.

Miras also noted that farmers and their families need special direct aid in case of drought.

“They also need to increase the organisation between farmers, to create associations, so that they can improve the exchange of information, the requests to the authorities,” he says. Better seeds, locally adapted to a more arid climate, and innovative farming practices like conservation agriculture could also help.

Much of this remains a distant dream due to Mozambique’s economic situation. However, even with limited or no financial support from the government, some small-scale farmers in Mozambique have ventured into climate resilience programmes. 

Allan Schwarz, a climate change expert and founder of the Mezimbite Forest Center, says the common narrative around climate change was mostly about carbon emissions. And while it is true that carbon emissions mostly from the overuse of fossil fuels is a cause of global climate change, Schwarz says, it is certainly not the only cause.

“In Mozambique, even though the country exports millions of tons of coal and natural gas and is planning on exploiting even more natural gas, it is not a big user of its products and does not emit that much carbon from its energy consumption. So this makes us look like victims of the developed North. Nothing could be further from the truth,” he says. 

Schwarz adds that the main cause of climate change in Mozambique is deforestation and desertification.

“How this changes the microclimate is very easy to experience from a simple demonstration. Go and stand in a field in the sun, lots of our fields are burned in the process of clearing them for planting; it is hot to the point of being unpleasant. Now go and stand under a tree. You immediately feel relieved. The shade from the tree prevents further heat gain and build-up. Then you notice there is a sunny side of the tree and a shady side, the sunny side heats up while the shady side is cooler,” he explains.

There is a pressure differential between the two sides, he adds, so in simple terms hot air goes up and cool air goes down.

“The two sides are linked through the space that you are standing in so you feel a gentle breeze. The breeze removes the moisture from your skin, and that evaporation of water lifts the heat with it. You are definitely cooling down. Climate is about these three things,: heat, air movement, and moisture. The tree changed your immediate microclimate to something more bearable. Now imagine it was a whole stand of trees…..and then a whole forest,” Schwarz says. 

Mozambique – which in the last baseline study by Wild and Barbosa in 1963 had around 75% forest cover – is now arguably approaching single figures.

Agroforestry has registered successes as a practical climate change solution in several African regions, according to ICEI, an NGO working on agroforestry in Mozambique. In Mozambique, the NGO says, agroforestry has “led to improved food production, soil protection and the preservation of biodiversity.”

And one study has shown that agroforestry can buffer crops from climate extremes, increase adaptive capacity, and help cope with risks or uncertainties. 

“Agroforestry practices can reduce net greenhouse gas budgets by sequestering carbon in soil and biomass, decreasing fossil fuel usage by reduced equipment runs in fields, enhancing energy conservation around farm buildings, and enhancing efficiency of nitrogen fertilizer use,” the study says. The study adds that woody riparian and hedgerow habitats on a Central Valley farm in California, U.S. stored 18% of the farmscape’s total carbon, despite occupying only 6% of the total area.

“We have changed our own climate, and most of this under the supervision of the current government. The rulers [government] have also failed to see that our people are fed, with the embarrassing statistic that at no time since independence has there been less than 40% chronic child malnutrition,” Schwarz adds.

Over the last 30 years, Mezimbite Forest Center has developed some good systems for restoring the forest and with it changing the microclimate.

“If to scale, it can also change our regional climate back to what it was 50 years ago, and keep it reasonably stable,” he said. “Basically what we do is ‘regenerative organic agroforestry’ in which we grow our food crops with indigenous trees ,most of which are leguminous, so they help restore fertility – but we also add some non-timber forest crops,”  says Schwarz.

So their trees  – about 2,000 per hectare– are looked after as a by-product of growing food.

“It appears to be in the national character that farmers with a corporate or state salary are not very productive, while family sector farmers, even though they lack capital and skills are way more productive when working to their own account. If we are to make things better we play to our strength; our family sector farmers,” he adds. 

However, it takes a lot of time and effort to transfer lost skills back to farmers,.  Schwarz says they started by training them on a 1/4 hectare growing not only the staples that they know, but everything needed to have a full and healthy diet in strict rotation of very diverse crops, with heavy mulch.

“The tree density is five times what is natural to the environment. After a year the trees that were planted are established. We add a further 1/4 ha to each farm each year with trees and food crops. Small animal livestock are added where it can be afforded,” Schwarz says.

He says within four years the family sector farmer was cultivating a full hectare which provided full nutrition for the family and sufficient surpluses to trade to have some discretionary spending.

An aerial view of a Mozambique town, 2019. Image by Bilderboken.

“After four years the first block has too much shade to produce food crops, except of course for the tree crops of fruit, nuts and fibre and a fifth block is established…so each year one new block is established and one is left for the trees to slowly turn into a forest,” he says. “Eight years and the trees were now tall and straight, and it was time to thin them out to the natural density of 400 trees per hectare.

He says the thinning is used for construction poles, fuel wood ,and charcoal, and the smaller bits  for biochar to further improve soil fertility. 

“So the old system of slash and burn is reversed, and we leave a nascent forest in our wake,” he adds. 

The whole system improves soil life , fertility, and moisture control – and it is very resilient. Not only does this system of agroforestry defend and mitigate the impacts, but it also restores all the biomass, some biodiversity and the regional climate. 

And other organizations like the União Nacional de Camponeses (UNAC)  – a peasant farmer’s movement in Mozambique – are supporting small-scale farmers’ efforts to build climate resilience. Bartolomeu António Henriques, a UNAC technician, says they are mapping, retrieving, multiplying, and storing local varieties of native seeds that were drought-resistant. In the province of Maputo, UNAC is spearheading seed multiplication fields of native varieties of maize, peanut, and black bean.

“These varieties are considered by farmers to be resistant to drought, and in the trials we are doing they tell us that they are tolerant to drought,” Henriques says.

In Mozambique’s drought-prone central region, two native maize varieties  – kanhankulo and molocue –  proved to be tolerant to drought.  In addition, these varieties were not attacked by weevils.

Another native crop that was on the verge of extinction and has been rescued is a local variety of cassava. The variety is resistant to pests and can be stored for a long period.

“We are also multiplying the local variety of onion. This variety has a great advantage because it is possible to store for a long time. It is a culture practiced mainly in the provinces of Nampula, Niassa and Zambezia,” Henriques says.

Several other programs to rescue and multiply native seeds are going on in Inhambane and Manica provinces.

 However, while agroforestry and conservation agriculture have been a part of national policy for well over 20 years, and donors have spent millions of dollars supporting the government, the policy has never been implemented in any meaningful way across the whole of Mozambique.

And about financial support for agroforestry and conservation agriculture, Mezimbite Forest Center founder, Schwarz sums it all up when he says: “As for attracting funds, maybe the money has been sent to the wrong people, who are not providing results; and consequently donors and investors are reluctant to waste more and should be getting the funds more directly to the people who do the work, the family sector farmers, and those people who are willing to share their appropriate technology expertise directly with those real farmers.”

~

These are the sorts of large-scale investments – to the tune of billions of dollars – that Mozambique would need to make: not to prevent climate change from happening (that’s already a certainty), but to make itself more resilient to the inevitable consequences, protecting its people from starvation and natural disaster. 

Will they be made? As we’ve seen, while the country does have some revenue from its exports to Europe and China, the dollar revenue from these imports is overwhelmingly diverted away from investment – instead, up to the present, these revenues have gone to service the scandalously inflated debts to European banks, to fund the war effort against ISIS, or into the pockets of corrupt politicians. And this recent history is a further discouragement to any potential foreign direct investment that could’ve helped to close the financing gap.

With Mozambique going for the presidential elections this very Wednesday, it remains to be seen whether the new government will prioritise funding for climate change resilience. But for now many people in the country are continuing to sink deeper into the abyss of climate change induced poverty; life is increasingly becoming difficult for poor people in Mozambique with each passing year. ~

Author

  • Andrew Mambondiyani is a journalist based in Zimbabwe with bylines in local, regional, and international publications, including the BBC, MIT Technology Review, Yale E360, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, The Daily, and Mongabay, among others. Twitter: @mambondiyani

    View all posts

Strange Matters is a cooperative magazine of new and unconventional thinking in economics, politics, and culture.