By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, May 22 1996 (IPS)

The settlement of 1,000 white South African farmers in Mozambique’s northern province of Niassa is about to become a reality.

In the pipeline for about a year, the controversial joint venture agreement known as MOSAGRIUS was signed by Presidents Nelson Mandela and Joaquim Chissano on May 6 paving the way for the arrival of mainly Afrikaner farmers quitting the new South Africa and looking for fresh opportunities in impoverished Mozambique.

Under MOSAGRIUS, a scheme pushed by right-wing ex-General Constant Viljoen and his brother Abraham, the farmers will be offered incentives — lasting for 50-years in the case of maize production on up to 1,000 hectares — to develop their land.

MOSAGRIUS, in which the South African Chamber for Agriculture in Africa (SACAA) owns more than two-thirds of the shares, is looking for funding to the tune of nine million dollars.

According to sources in Maputo, the delay in signing the agreement was down to Mozambique looking for a quid pro quo. In exchange for the allocation of land, Chissano apparently wanted guarantees that Mozambican migrant labourers — whose remittances are important sources of foreign exchange — would not be caught up in the current anti-immigration wave in South Africa.

Mozambique has, together with Angola, the largest amount of available land in Southern Africa. Of its total 79.4 million hectares, 36 million are productive, of which 16 million are wooded and 18 million arable.

Of the 18 million hectares, less than 10 percent is under cultivation. Of this, about 90 percent is farmed by peasants, totalling some 2.5 million families, or 80 percent of the total population of Mozambique, estimated at 17 million.

Mozambique’s available land looms large in the context of regional politics, where a land-hungry, economically powerful and volatile neighbor like South Africa looks keenly next door — and beyond — for new horizons to offer its politically restive white farmers.

The legacy of apartheid in South Africa is that about 87 percent of agricultural land remains in the hands of some 40,000 white farmers while millions of rural blacks are confined to marginal areas.

South Africans now wait for the new government to fulfill its promise of land redistribution and restitution to Blacks. With many farms exhausted due to intensive land use, others poised for redistribution, the future does not look good for Afrikaner farmers who would like to preserve their old lifestyles.

Some have already emigrated to Congo. A deal involving 150,000 hectares in Angola was reported in the Portuguese press. Through MOSAGRIUS, other Boers will set out, as their grandparents, on a new Great Trek towards Niassa, in Mozambique.

Originally, the Boers wanted land in southern Mozambique, closer to South Africa, but land pressure is too intense and the north was offered.

Niassa is the largest and least populated of all Mozambique’s provinces. Of its 12 million hectares of arable land, only 188,000 hectares are cultivated. A variety of food and cash crops can be grown in its mild climate. Cattle rearing, fishing and eco-tourism along Lake Niassa are possibilities. Landmines, bad roads, destroyed infrastructure and distant markets are a reality.

Being a government-initiated scheme, MOSAGRIUS has not been discussed in the Mozambican parliament, but has been widely condemned. On the day the agreement was signed, with Mandela in town, the main daily published criticisms from the leaders of four opposition parties. The approval, one month before a national conference to debate a new land law, is seen as hasty.

“It’s not a good idea to sign an agreement giving 1,000 Boers the best land in one province while we have minor land conflicts across the country and are preparing for the land conference,” says Raul Domingos, the parliamentary leader of Renamo, the largest opposition party.

MOSAGRIUS is presented as Mozambique’s passport to achieve food security, food self-sufficiency and cash crops for export. The South African, it is argued, will bring sophisticated technology to help Mozambique develop its agriculture, create jobs and grow needed food.

“Why should we import Boers and give them land to acquire their know-how?” wonders Domingos. “Why can’t we send Mozambican farmers to train in South Africa?’

He points that, in just three years of peace, seeds and tools distribution and good rains, Mozambican peasants have more than tripled maize production, harvesting 934,000 tons this year, more than enough to cover Mozambique’s needs. Maize surpluses rot in the northern provinces for lack of silos, roads and markets.

“This is a political coup of Frelimo (the ruling party) to thank its friend, the ANC, for the assistance given in the 1994 elections, by helping Mandela fulfill his promise of returning land to blacks,” Domingos fumes. “If the agreement hurts Mozambique but helps Frelimo continue in power, it’s fine for them.”

Emerging from 17-years of civil war — in which Renamo was backed by apartheid South Africa against the Frelimo government — Mozambique’s economy is in ruins, and badly needs investment in its agricultural sector. The problem is how to manage it.

“The question is not the Boers but how to link foreign and national capital in agriculture, how to link the commercial and the subsistence or family sectors,” says Jose Negrao, Director of the Group for the Study of Land at the University Eduardo Mondlane.

“We cannot keep the family sector, which provides the labour for the commercial sector, with low technology forever. There has to be an investment on the family sector and the commercial sector should do it.”

Negrao suggests that farms allocated to Boers should be interspersed with those of Mozambicans, both commercial and subsistence farmers. “We must avoid creating white ghettos, repeating the history of our region,” he argues.

Whether MOSAGRIUS will become an engine of growth for Niassa, a source of land conflicts with local people, or a means to accumulate wealth for a few white farmers, only time will tell.

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