Exploring opportunities for rural livelihoods and food security in Central Mozambique

Abstract

Growing awareness of widespread hunger and poverty in many countries in the SSA is spurring a focus on productivity increase in smallholder farming systems. The rationale is that with current production systems many SSA countries are not keeping pace with population growth and changing of peoples' lifestyles. To respond to this challenge the Government of Mozambique developed its Strategic Plan for Agricultural Development (PEDSA) aiming to improve agricultural productivity of the majority of smallholder farmers who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Smallholder farmers are diverse in terms of resources and aspirations. The main objectives of this study are first to understand the diversity among maize-based smallholder farms and their current constraints in improving agricultural productivity in the Manica Plateau, Central Mozambique, and second, building on that understanding to explore options for biomass production either for food, cash or biofuel at farm level and contributions to maize availability in the region. The study was conducted in the Dombe and Zembe Administrative Posts. Farmers in the two posts cultivate both food and cash crops using the same resources, however, distances to the urban market differ, with Zembe close and Dombe far away from the markets. In addition, the agroecological conditions for crop production are more favourable in Dombe compared with Zembe. Using farm surveys, direct observations and on-farm measurements, followed by Principal Components Analysis (PCA) I identified land and labour as the variables that can best explain the variability found among smallholder farms (Chapter 2). Based on these variables I categorised farms into four Farm Types (FT): FT1. Large farms (4.4 ha in Dombe and 2.2 ha in Zembe), hiring in labour; FT2. Intermediate sized farms (1.9-1.2 ha), hiring in and out labour; FT3a. Small farms (1.1-0.9 ha), sharing labour; and FT3b. Small farms (1.0-0.7 ha), hiring out labour. The maize yield and maize labour productivities were higher on large farms (2.3 t ha -1 in Dombe and 2.0 t ha -1 in Zembe; 2.5×10 -3 t h -1 in Dombe and 2.6 ×10 -3 t h -1 in Zembe) compared with small farms (1.5 t ha -1 in Dombe and 1.1 t ha -1 in Zembe;1.4×10 -3 t h -1 in Dombe and 0.9×10 -3 t h -1 in Zembe). The hiring in labour from small farms allowed large farms to timely weed their fields. Small farms were resource constrained and viii hired out labour (mutrakita) for cash or food to the detriment of weeding their own fields, resulting in poor crop yields. Excessive alcohol consumption by small farms also raised concerns on labour quality. Chapter 3 explored options aiming at addressing farmers' objectives of being maize self-sufficient and increased gross margin and the contribution to national objective of producing food. A bio-economic farm model was used to investigate two pathways to increase agricultural production: (i) extensification, expanding the current cultivated area; and (ii) intensification, increasing input use and output per unit of land...

Inter Provincial Comparison of Agricultural Productivity in Mozambique

“…Thus, the coefficients of models 1 and 3 reflect the long-term productivity adjustment. Problems of labor productivity, which seems to be stationary within the province (models 2 and 4), may be consistent with the low levels of adoption of new production technologies reported by Leonardo (2017), besides that, this is a costly process and takes a lot of time [15], [17]. This means that with existing farming and land tenure systems, the labor productivity may remain unchanged and, therefore, to increase the agricultural production it will be necessary an increase in agricultural workforce.…”