Plantation designs in northern Mozambique: development, struggles and (re)compositions facing the ProSAVANA program

ABSTRACT

ProSAVANA was a technical cooperation program signed between the governments of Brazil, Japan, and Mozambique. Its aim was to promote agricultural development in the northern region of this African country. In this article, I give an ethnographic account of ProSAVANA’s implementation and the different struggles that emerged in opposition to its undertakings. As I describe, the program promoters constantly mobilized three allegories evocative of connections and flow in their fieldwork, speeches, or documents: parallels, chains, and corridors. Although, at the territorial level, these were connected to effects of isolation and fixation of the local population and their agriculture. Based on this controversy, I suggest that ProSAVANA can be understood as those world design projects that perform what Anna Tsing called a “plantation ecology,” that is, machines to produce the same, that operate to expand their scale while creating simplified, homogenized, and standardized models on diverse landscapes. Nevertheless, throughout the ProSAVANA implementation, their plantation designs were (re)composed both by technicians who aimed to promote its development model and by peasants and activists critical of the program, showing that these configurations alone cannot comprehensively circumscribe human agency.

RESUMO

O ProSAVANA foi um programa de cooperação técnica assinado entre os governos do Brasil, Japão e Moçambique, cujo objetivo era promover o desenvolvimento agrícola na região norte deste país africano. Neste artigo, apresento uma análise de cunho etnográfico sobre a implementação do ProSAVANA e as diferentes formas de lutas que surgiram em oposição aos seus empreendimentos. Conforme descrevo, os promotores do programa mobilizavam frequentemente três alegorias evocativas de conexões e fluxos em seus trabalhos de campo, discursos ou documentos: paralelos, cadeias e corredores. Ainda que, ao nível territorial, estes estivessem ligados a efeitos de isolamento e fixação da população local e da sua agricultura. Com base nessa controvérsia, sugiro que o ProSAVANA pode ser entendido como um dos projetos de design de mundos que realizam o que Anna Tsing chamou de “ecologia da plantation,” ou seja, máquinas para produzir o mesmo, que operam para expandir sua escala enquanto modelos simplificados, homogeneizados e padronizados de paisagens diversas. Contudo, ao longo da implementação do ProSAVANA, seus designs de plantations foram (re)compostos tanto por técnicos que visavam promover seu modelo de desenvolvimento, quanto por camponeses e ativistas críticos ao programa, mostrando que essas configurações sozinhas não podem circunscrever de forma abrangente a agência humana.

RESUMEN

ProSAVANA fue un programa de cooperación técnica suscrito entre los gobiernos de Brasil, Japón y Mozambique, cuyo objetivo fue promover el desarrollo agrícola en la región norte de este país africano. En este artículo presento un análisis etnográfico de la implementación de ProSAVANA y las diferentes formas de lucha que surgieron en oposición a sus emprendimientos. Como describo, los promotores del programa frecuentemente movilizaron tres alegorías evocadoras de conexiones y flujos en su trabajo de campo, discursos o documentos: paralelos, cadenas y corredores. Aunque, a nivel territorial, estos estaban vinculados a los efectos del aislamiento y asentamiento de la población local y su agricultura. Con base en esta controversia, sugiero que ProSAVANA puede entenderse como uno de los proyectos de diseño de mundos que realizan lo que Anna Tsing llamó “ecología de plantation,” es decir, máquinas para producir lo mismo, que operan para expandir su escala mientras simplifican, homogeneizan y estandarizan modelos de paisajes diversos. Sin embargo, a lo largo de la implementación de ProSAVANA, sus diseños de plantations fueron (re)compuestos tanto por técnicos que pretendían promover su modelo de desarrollo, como por campesinos y activistas críticos del programa, mostrando que estas configuraciones por sí solas no pueden circunscribir la agencia humana de manera integral.

KEYWORDS:

• Plantation
• development
• resistance
• international cooperation

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Plantation
• desenvolvimento
• resistência
• cooperação internacional

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Plantation
• desarrollo
• resistencia
• cooperación internacional

During the G8 meeting in July 2009, the former President of Brazil and the Prime Minister of Japan established a cooperation proposal to develop agriculture in African Tropical Savannas. However, no African country was present at this meeting, and only months later would Mozambique be officially identified as the “beneficiary country” of the project (Ferrando 2015). In this context, ProSAVANA was launched, an international technical cooperation program for agricultural development of the Mozambican region known as the Nacala Corridor (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Nacala Corridor and its location in Mozambique. Source: ProSAVANA-PD 2013.

The main reference for such an initiative were the technologies aimed at commercial agriculture modernization developed in the mid-1970s in areas of the Brazilian Cerrado¹ through PRODECER (Japanese-Brazilian Cooperation Program for the Development of the Cerrado). Initially very emphasized by cooperating technicians, public managers, and politicians, this public-private partnership established between Brazil and Japan was one of the main ones responsible for implementing the technical strategies that expanded the Brazilian “agricultural frontier.” The Japanese government contributed $28 billion to infrastructure improvements (roads, power grids, ports, warehouses) and the transfer of modern agricultural technologies, which transformed, in a period of over 25 years (1974–1999), approximately 300 thousand hectares of Cerrado into export-oriented monoculture production areas (Okada 2015). Therefore, the technologies proposed to be transferred to Mozambique were largely the result of the transformations that promoted what we now understand as agribusiness in Brazil.

In order for the knowledge that enabled the “success” of Cerrado modernization to serve as a basis for this new endeavor in Mozambique, ProSAVANA proponents primarily had to highlight affinities between the very different multispecies landscapes of that Brazilian territory and the tropical Savannah of the Nacala Corridor. The construction of this comparison process has already been the subject of several studies (Camana 2020; Perin 2020b; Shankland and Gonçalves 2016; Stein 2021; Wolford and Nehring 2015). Other studies have focused on the implications of ProSAVANA for the Brazilian south-south technical cooperation (Cabral 2015; Cesarino 2015; Durán and Chichava 2013; Fingermann 2014; Milhorance 2017; Nogueira and Ollinaho 2013); on the risks of the ProSAVANA agricultural model promoting land grabbing and threats to the food sovereignty of local communities (Clements and Fernandes 2013; Funada-Classen 2019; Morais 2014; Mosca and Bruna 2015; Perin 2020a; Santarelli 2016; Schlesinger 2013); and on the intense opposition to the program by civil societies in Brazil, Mozambique, and Japan (Chichava 2017; Monjane and Bruna 2020; Perin 2021; Shankland, Gonçalves, and Favareto 2016).

Contributing to this knowledge community regarding ProSAVANA, in this article, I give an ethnographic in-depth account of its “technology transfer” and the different ways of lutas [struggles] that emerged in opposition to its undertakings. As I will describe, the program promoters constantly mobilized three allegories evocative of connections and flows in their fieldwork, speeches, or documents: parallels, chains, and corridors; although at the territorial level, these were connected to effects of isolation and fixation of the local population and their agriculture. Based on this controversy, I suggest that ProSAVANA can be understood as those world design projects that perform what Tsing (2019) called a “plantation ecology,” that is, machines to produce the same, that operate to expand their scale while creating simplified, homogenized, and standardized models on diverse landscapes. “This (colonial) machine for making landscapes is the result of the modern dream of overcoming nature through technical dexterity, ignoring the multiple compositions in which it is inserted” (Camana 2020, 144).

Established in already inhabited regions, the plantation is an ideal replication of capitalist schemes for the global circulation of commodities (Mintz 1985; Wolf 2010). By managing land, labor, and capital in an inherently colonial manner, it appears alien, peculiar, and characterized by unpredictability, operating under the assumption that local inhabitants lack the capacity for effective production (Li and Semedi 2021). Therefore, new relationships arise from their framing of multispecies worlds, allowing the transformation of ecologies into something completely different, modifying plants, animals, and organisms (including people) that become part of the plantation (Haraway 2015; Haraway et al. 2016). Following Mckittrick (2013), it is worth noting that the logic of the plantation is that of a racial economy, which “was mapped onto the lands of no one and became the location where black peoples were “planted” in the Americas – not as members of society but as commodities that would bolster crop economies” (8).

As Haraway and Tsing (2019) point out, for at least 500 years, plantations have been forms of reorganizing the lives of species in the world through some combination of the following characteristics: radical ecological simplification; displacement of peoples, crops, microorganisms, and life forms; forced disciplining of labor (often racialized); the disorder in generation times between species. A legacy so naturalized that it frequently gets confused with the meaning of agriculture itself, eclipsing other ways of farming. While it may seem like an anachronistic concept, plantations never really went away (Moore et al. 2021).

As some critical science and technology studies theorists have suggested, more than in the Anthropocene, thought as an act of the human species and subject to a “techno-fix,” we have been living in the Plantationocene for at least five centuries: (Haraway 2015; Haraway et al. 2016): a complex assemblage of situated peoples and their apparatuses (including their critters), which depends on systematic practices of relocation for the energy extraction/exploitation of plants, animals, microorganisms. In this sense, Haraway points out that the plantation operates as a “cognitive technology,” part of the rationality that is conventionally called Cartesian thinking, the basis of modern science. “[I]t refers to a certain, historically specific, way of appropriating the land, namely an appropriation of land as if the land was not there. Plantationocene is a historical “de-soilization” of the Earth” (Latour et al. 2018, 5–6), also connected to what Stengers (2015) called the triad “State, Science and Entrepreneurs” and its ability to transform everything into a resource.

According to Wolford (2021), those plantation dynamics persist currently in the modernizing ideal of ordered rationality over large-scale extractive landscapes, which define the social, ecological, and political characteristics of the new commodities frontiers. As Wolford states, “The return of the plantation is perhaps nowhere so evident as in Mozambique, where the governments of Brazil, Mozambique, and Japan announced an ambitious new plan to transform Mozambican agriculture (…)” (p.1631) – the ProSAVANA. Nevertheless, throughout the ProSAVANA implementation, their plantation designs were (re)composed both by technicians who aimed to promote its development model and by peasants and activists critical of the program.

Therefore, my second and primary contention within this article posits that even as plantation designs establish organized and standardized environments, these configurations alone cannot comprehensively circumscribe human agency. Acts of refusal, disruptions, resistances, and openings remain intrinsic to the (black) experience within historical and contemporary plantations, extending into their future ramifications (Davis et al. 2018; Mckittrick 2013). Initiatives that, to some extent, propose the relocation of populations to better address their needs, endeavor to rationalize land utilization and farming methods, or aim to educate and modernize peoples and territories, inevitably find themselves entangled in arenas of political contention (Li 2007). As a result, diverse forms of struggles emerged with the advent of ProSAVANA in the Nacala Corridor, infiltrating the established plantation designs in northern Mozambique.

To “re-ground” or “re-territorialize” these plantation system practices (Latour et al. 2018) the ethnographic data² presented here is based mainly on eight months of fieldwork in Mozambique, in October 2016 and between July 2017 and March 2018. During this period, I could establish contacts with Mozambican civil society organizations, which had launched an international campaign to contest ProSAVANA with the participation of organizations and social movements from Brazil and Japan. Some members of this campaign were my main interlocutors and mediators so that I could contact peasants’ organizations in the north of the country. They, in turn, helped me in the visits I made to some peasant communities in the Nacala Corridor.

In the first four months of the longest fieldwork period, I traveled regularly between Maputo and the city of Nampula, in the province of the same name. I was able to carry out interviews or more informal conversations with scientists, technicians, and public managers involved in the program, as well as peasants’ communities, representatives of the campaign opposing ProSAVANA, and NGOs that decided to initiate a dialogue to modify some of its proposals. Between November and December 2017, I spent approximately twenty days in Lichinga city, in the Niassa province, located at the other “end” of the corridor (if we consider the port region of Nacala as its beginning). During my visit, almost daily I was with Mozambican technicians and officials from the Provincial Directorate of Agriculture, who were reporting what had been done in that region. During this period, I was also in touch with civil society and peasant organizations to learn about their perspectives on ProSAVANA.

In the final fieldwork stage, carried out between February and March 2018, I was, in fact, able to cross the entire Nacala Corridor accompanied by another researcher. We stayed in Nampula for a few weeks, during which we visited the structures of the Laboratory of Analysis of Plants and Soils built under ProSAVANA, a cooperative of producers who participated in one of the extension projects of the program, in addition to conducting some more interviews with members of the provincial government and of NGOs. Then we traveled towards the province of Zambézia, making stops at places where activities related to the program had been executed. We were able to talk to peasants (individually or in groups), attend a project meeting focusing on the delimitation of community lands, interview members of the local government and technicians who worked in ProSAVANA. Moreover, we visited three agricultural companies. Upon returning to Nampula, we decided to go a little further to the city of Nacala on the coast, and visit the port that closes the logistics chain that ProSAVANA is integrated into, where we also conducted interviews.³

1. Outlining parallels

Although the implementation of ProSAVANA started in 2011, a memorandum of understanding between the three cooperating countries was signed in September 2009. From then on, the image of the 13th and 17th South parallels, connecting South America and Southern Africa, was attached to the program's imagery. The area covered by these latitudinal bands established a relationship between the Brazilian Cerrado and the Savannah of northern Mozambique, allowing such a cartographic scale to trigger a series of possible similarities between the regions. Therefore, in the first documents and public statements about the program, the “tropicality” of these landscapes, concerning their type of soil, climate, vegetation, and rainfall regime, was very emphasized. The idea of a shared and even more replicable nature among the two countries was also legitimated through a set of data, charts, maps, satellite information, and other techno-scientific artifacts that promoted the ProSAVANA in different instances (Camana 2020; Perin 2020b; Shankland and Gonçalves 2016; Wolford and Nehring 2016).

In this way, the Nacala Corridor was initially portrayed as a place with numerous unused lands inhabited by small and medium farmers whose traditional agricultural practices limited productivity, sales, and consumption (Funada-Classen 2013). Through the image of parallels, however, it was claimed that these farmers could increase their production through the intensive use of improved technologies that would be taught by Brazilian scientists and technicians. A Cartesian logic “that classifies spaces as equivalent through latitudinal similarities and abstracts ecologies and landscapes through categories such as tropics, savannas, or corridors” (Wolford and Nehring 2016, 212). Thus, the plantation ecology currently expressed in Brazilian agribusiness could be replicated in the Nacala Corridor.

Northern Mozambique is the most populated region of the country, as it has very fertile land, good rainfall, a considerable number of watercourses, and forest reserves. The Nacala corridor consists of a network of small machambas, agricultural plots, as they are called in the country, and due to the traditional system of swidden farming practiced by farmers living in the region, it is difficult to find contiguous arable land as would be required for a plantation. Intercropping food such as cassava, maize, beans, peanuts, rice, and vegetables, and maintaining fallow land to preserve soil fertility were the main farming techniques used on the little more than one hectare of collective land owned by the communities. Those were not empty, unproductive, or disposable lands.⁴ Therefore, since the initial movements for the implementation of ProSAVANA, UNAC (National Union of Peasants) already warned of the risks of expropriation of peasant lands.

This situation was aggravated by the fact that there were no publicly disclosed documents until the beginning of 2013, as no consultation had been held to present the ProSAVANA proposal to the populations that would be affected by it. So, a group of national and foreign social movements took a stand against the program. They questioned its “lack of transparency” and “absence of a participatory process,” especially after the late disclosure of a relatively advanced version of its Master Plan that established a coverage area corresponding to 14 million hectares to implant large production clusters, based mainly on the cultivation of agricultural commodities (Perin 2021). However, the document did not provide details about how the peasants would be integrated into these clusters, although it did present detailed territorial zoning (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Zoning of the Nacala Corridor by production cluster. Source: ProSAVANA-PD 2013.

By categorizing the Nacala Corridor according to land utilization, socio-environmental vulnerability, production scales, human resource potential, and land accessibility, the Master Plan introduced six distinct “agricultural management types,” as outlined in the provided diagram. This approach embodies a “will to improve” akin to the developmental strategies elucidated by Li (2007), involving interventions that primarily identify deficiencies needing rectification; followed by a series of “rendering technical” practices, executed to portray a domain as a coherent realm with well-defined attributes and boundaries suitable for applying specific modern techniques. In the context of ProSAVANA, a similar pattern emerged, where concerns surrounding traditional peasant farming methods were interpreted as issues stemming from inadequate resource use. The proposed solution involved implementing more efficient techniques and increased investments to enhance productivity.

Nevertheless, planned development interventions always intersect with other movements that dispute definitions of landscapes, daily lives, and values. In this way, since 2014, organizations and social movements in Mozambique, Brazil, and Japan have started a movement to reject the program – the No to ProSAVANA Campaign. Through advocacy work with governments of their own countries, besides disseminating and discussing documents in peasant communities, the campaign members managed to delay, reformulate, or even paralyze some stages of this enterprise (Perin 2022; Shankland, Gonçalves, and Favareto 2016). One of its first actions was organizing a visit by representatives of Mozambican social movements to the Brazilian Cerrado, so that they could get to know “the real situation of agribusiness,” as one of the activists that accompanied this mobilization described to me.

Through this contact with the Cerrado landscape and their people, the demonstrators were able to establish a link between rural movements in both countries and build the foundations of a “common resistance.” Such experiences are already part of a Memory of Resistance to ProSAVANA (Aguiar and Pacheco 2016), based on what they have called “South-South Cooperation of the Peoples of Brazil and Mozambique.” According to this, the demonstrators understood cooperation between governments as a non-participatory process without transparency, guided by the agribusiness development model. Contrasting with these standards, they proposed a “parallel cooperation,” driven by ideals of people’s solidarity and self-determination over their territories. Therefore, the parallel designs allowed both the promotion of south-south cooperation and the dispute over their meanings (Shankland and Gonçalves 2016).

In October 2017, in the city of Maputo, I was able to follow the 3rd People’s Triangular Conference, a No to ProSAVANA Campaign meeting. Opposing the narrative of the “success” of the agricultural model implemented in the Cerrado, Marta, a Brazilian representative of the Pastoral Land Commission, exposed how multiple peoples were displaced from their territories, understood by the Brazilian government as available spaces – similar to what was being done with the Nacala Corridor. In her speech, the activist called attention to the meanings of agricultural modernization: exploitation, deforestation, monoculture, and a process of uprooting people and ways of life. A des-envolvimento,⁵ she said, as it separated people from the relevant relationships that give meaning to their lives.

Similarly, Isabel, one of my interlocutors in a Mozambican women's movement, emphasized that the opposition to ProSAVANA was because it assessed land only as a production space. While for peasant women, their machambas are still a place of bonding, tradition, relationship with ancestors, cultivation of their medicinal plants, and more. To expropriate a peasant land, said Isabel, was to create a disconnection, a lack of belonging, hence a des-envolvimento. Even considering the historical specificity of each context, the machambas of Mozambican peasants can be related to what in the colonized Americas was configured as “plots,” those spaces within or adjacent to the plantation where slaves grew their food that became the focus of resistance to the dominant system of the plantation economy:

(…) a social order that is developed within the context of a dehumanizing system as it spatializes what would be considered impossible under slavery: the actual growth of narratives, food, and cultural practices that materialize the deep connections between blackness and the earth and foster values that challenge systemic violence. (…) [A]n awareness of how the land and nourishment can sustain alternative worldviews and challenge practices of dehumanization. (Mckittrick 2013, 10–11)

A plantation ecology shows how modernization needs to create terra nullius, nature without entangled native relations, through which living beings are successively extracted from their worlds of life and transformed into resources or future assets (Tsing 2019). Moreover, Marta's speech also dealt with forms of resistance that only peasants, traditional communities, and native peoples could achieve through the rescue of their own way of life, such as the collective exchange of seeds and farming practices integrated into the relationships these peoples establish with their territories – and not despite them, as plantations do. “It is these resistances that communities are showing us today,” opposing the “new colonization brought by capital,” she concluded.

At this same meeting, Sérgio, a member of MPA (Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores) [Brazilian Movement of Small Farmers], emphasized how today, many small Brazilian farmers were able to supply their needs autonomously and still produce harvests on scale through projects to rescue native seeds. Thus, the MPA has been maintaining parallel cooperation projects with the Mozambican UNAC to share experiences to improve the agriculture those communities already carry out. According to Sérgio, “We want to show that another cooperation is possible, the cooperation of the peoples, which is peasant’s cooperation.” Engaged in a luta comum [common struggle] to maintain their native seeds and plots, the peasants said “an emphatic no to the megaprojects, stronger than a street demonstration,” concluded the farmer, as they would be threatening an entire chain of companies.

2. (De)configuring chains

On multiple occasions, ProSAVANA technicians and public officials I engaged with during my fieldwork emphasized that when they mentioned agribusiness, they were specifically referring to the “value chain” that would result from “technology transfer.” Therefore, they intended to distance the program from the familiar portrayal of Brazilian large monoculture plantations. As Tomás, a member of the Mozambican Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, clarified, “The definition of agribusiness in Brazil differs from what is understood here (…). Our interpretation of agribusiness revolves around the concept of the value chain.” According to this expert, approximately 70% of agricultural activities take place beyond the machamba, leading him to inquire, “How can small-scale farmers benefit from the 70% that occurs beyond their direct involvement? That includes integrating the small farmer into the value chain creation process. We are talking about agro-processing, establishing a connection between the small producer and the market,” he concluded.

Something quite different from the traditional agricultural practice of Mozambican peasants, described by companheiro [comrade] Vicente, president of the Provincial Peasant Union of Nampula (UPC-Nampula):

(…) We are used to having a machamba of a hectare, or two, or three hectares, for example, of corn, mapira [sorghum], or beans, but then we must move away from here. We go down [to the river] to open another machamba for rice production. Later, we must go to other places to produce other crops. (…) We also used to produce here for two, three, four, five years, or six years. It depends on the soil. Then we let it rest. (…) We open a new plot and this one, we let it fallow. If we let it rest, it does not mean that this land is abandoned. It does not mean that this is land that is not used. No. We let it rest so that the soil can absorb nutrients again, to guarantee production. (…) Without using chemicals, we leave it to fallow. We came back to that old field. We reopen it again. We produce like this. (Vicente, peasant, Nampula, 2017)

In these excerpts from Vicente's speech, the two essential farming techniques for Mozambican peasants are present: intercropping and a fallow land system. Both use the plants and organic soil components to keep their machambas fertile, without using “chemicals,” but through management that composes the local landscape's multispecies assemblages. As Davis et al. (2019) argue, the peasant plot is a relational mode of being and engagement with the world, also “(…) it might help conceptualize multispecies assemblages (…) that are not just envisioned but lived and that simultaneously tend to the needs of social reproduction, social justice, and ecological care” (p. 8). Vicente reinforced, “If you go from here to Nacala, you will not cover space of at least ten kilometers (…) with only woods. You will not find it. If there are no cashew trees, there are houses. If you do not have houses, you have machambas, or someone left that land fallow.”

Even though ProSAVANA did not propose to implement large monoculture farms in the region, its technical components sought to encourage the integration of medium and small farmers into the agribusiness value chain. However, given the outline of land occupation in the Nacala Corridor, critics of the program continued to question: where could these agribusiness ventures attracted by the modernization of agriculture settle down? Technicians like Tomás also recognized this intricate situation. For him, “the only way to do agriculture [in Mozambique] is to involve the communities themselves. You will have to use the machambas or the communities’ lands to do industrial agriculture. But to say that you will find an extensive area, for 200 hectares, you will not find it.”

The primary strategy to “involve” these communities was contract farming initiatives. These were based on an out-grower system, in which a small producer acts as a supplier for a central agricultural business unit. The company thus makes some inputs and technical services available, deducting their costs from the final production. Therefore, agribusiness in Mozambican conditions would be related to the promotion of basic arrangements for small farmers to be integrated into the designs of national and international plantations – the value chain itself – and the creation of possibilities for entrepreneurs to find continuous land areas. Along with the contracts, ProSAVANA’s extension models intended to stimulate the increase in productivity of peasant agriculture, offering some inputs for production on a larger scale, continuously and in wider areas: silos, motor pumps, milling machines, in addition to credit and input packages (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides) for intensive soil use. Initiatives were usually not differing from what NGOs and international cooperation programs in the country have been doing for decades (Dias De Adrade 2019; Smart and Hanlon 2014).

However, for most communities in the Nacala Corridor, such a connection with the value chain is still far from being implemented. What usually happens, activists from the No to ProSAVANA Campaign warned, is that contracts make peasants dependent on inputs from the contracting company. Consequently, such changes in the peasants’ farming could lead to the loss of their areas due to indebtedness for the continuous acquisition of inputs. Similarly, settling farmers on a piece of land frees up former fallow plots to be integrated into plantations supply chains – then it would be possible to find the lands described as “available.” Such proposals for settled agriculture might not immediately result in the acquisition of large areas or the displacement of peasants but in a change in land control that could lead to silent land grabbing (Ferrando 2015). A scenario already in force in the region, where land conflicts proliferate.

While visiting the Malema district in 2018, a place enlisted for the execution of ProSAVANA projects, I met companheiro Filipe, the leader organizing a District Union of Peasants (UDC) in that locality. Throughout our conversation, Filipe emphasized that the peasants who contested ProSAVANA were not against “development,”⁶ though, they had already had many bad experiences with land conflicts in which their traditional land rights were not respected. He reported the case in which the Mozambican grandchildren of a former Portuguese settler took over the lands of a community when they expanded the activities of their previous company, dislocating peasant families to a swampy region. Filipe also highlighted the conflict with a foreign company that received authorization from the Mozambican government to set up a soy farm with 10,000 hectares. The families that lived in the area were then resettled in a process in which “the peasants were not treated as people,” he said. Considering these experiences, when the consultations about ProSAVANA finally took place, peasants in the region were already on alert and fearful. Filipe considered these situations discouraging, but he reiterated, “We will not stop the struggle, this land is ours.”

Among these lutas were not only the “cooperation of peoples” but also those everyday strategies of resistance that James Scott called “weapons of the weak,” “the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract work, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them” (Scott 2002, 11). Traveling through the Nacala Corridor, there were constant rumors and reports of threats, confrontations, and even attacks by residents of the area against local government structures due to conflicts with agricultural companies. There was talk of the theft of products from entrepreneurs’ fields, the insistence of peasants on reoccupying the land they were taken from, of the burning of plantations, in addition to refusals to collaborate with community land delimitation programs, which used to reduce their fallow areas. A daily luta pela sobrevivência [struggle for survival] as an activist called it, is based on community reciprocities, on the bond with the land, ancestors, and spirits, as well as on the memory of ancient struggles led by peasants to trace their anti-sedentary tactics.⁷

Within the scope of ProSAVANA, this form of resistance emerged, for example, in the reports on the extension model that sought to foster activities among medium-sized companies and small farmers. These companies were selected to receive a credit line to promote commercial agriculture, with the condition that they would employ small producers. These, in turn, would receive seeds and inputs for a specific crop, and what was produced had to be sold exclusively to the company. However, the project did not go as expected, as explained by the owner of a plantation in Ribaué:

When the time comes to buy the product, the producer … many, many, sell to some other buyer (…) Because then they do not return the inputs and, possibly, that man can pay a little more. (…) It was highly subsidized. Even so, they diverted the product. We tried four years of that, but in the end, it did not work. Within that period, the ProSAVANA team, when they were there, watched, but had no action. (…) For them, it was like doing an experiment and seeing what happens, but the risk was all ours. (Entrepreneur, Maputo, 2017)

Through the intermediation of a UPC-Nampula “advocacy agent” who lives in this community in the Ribaué district, I was able to talk to these peasants, who told me how the situation was more problematic. According to the community’s report, “In the old days, before the arrival of the whites, our ancestors were living there,” then the Portuguese government allocated the land among the settlers, which removed the native people – until they left the region during the civil war:

(…) then we took back our area, as our ancestors were living there. We resumed and started living from 1983 until 2011 when the [settler's] children returned to that plantation. (…) They did not carry out the community consultation, only entered claiming to follow their ancestors who lived here (…). As they occupied 2800 hectares, we need an area which borders the river and this part (…). But with that, the people are always resisting and making their machambas, right there. (Peasant of Ribaué, Nampula, 2018)

The community was claiming an area where they could cultivate their machambas, as the land they were allocated is very sandy and has insufficient space for the plot’s rotation. Consequently, they were pushed to a form of settled agriculture without any technical or technological assistance that would allow them to maintain harvest productivity. The other ProSAVANA extension models, aimed at the transfer of knowledge in intensive agriculture, did not reach this community; and the experience with contract farming did not bring the “involvement” with the value chain.

Nonetheless, I would like to highlight among these daily struggles a “peasant science” that can destabilize modern plantation sciences.⁸ According to a Mozambican agronomist from ProSAVANA’s Soil and Plant Analysis Laboratory, the cash crops that developed in the country, such as cashew and coconut trees, were not simply stimulated by the market, government, or international cooperation programs. The peasants adapted these crops and diverted new species from experimental areas or company farms, so they could be cultivated in their own machambas. As a UNAC member stated, “[the peasant] has science when he produces two years here, then goes to another area. This is fallow land; the soil is recovering. Later he returns and continues to crop here. (…) Therefore the land remains [fertile].” This science was also recalled by Sérgio during his speech at the People’s Triangular Conference when he remembered that it was the “peasants and indigenous people” who first carried out seed selection and improvement processes. A discovery that was fundamental for all of humanity, as it allowed people to “build territories” as “living spaces.” For this reason, their lutas could not be disconnected from the luta pela terra [struggle for land], “because it is the space where we take care of the seed,” he stated.

3. Composing corridors

Since their construction in the nineteenth century, Mozambique's railway lines, which connect mining areas, large plantations, and port areas, constitute one of the main factors for the country's socioeconomic dynamism. Recently, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has executed a series of rehabilitation projects for these lines, making it possible to draw connections between ProSAVANA and the recuperation of logistical infrastructures that compose its supply chain (JICA 2015). The production based on cash crops, for example, attracted not only large agricultural producers but transnational corporations of machinery and agricultural inputs. The activities of the Brazilian mining company Vale in Tete province, where it has a concession for the exploitation of high-quality mineral coal, are another factor that has ensured the dynamics of business in the Nacala Corridor. To enable the necessary infrastructure for the expansion of its entire production chain, the company rehabilitated a mine-railway-port complex, which involved an intricate alliance between the government and the mining company for the creation of a strategic route for the flow of goods across the Indian Ocean (Kato 2019) – including those that would be generated with the increase in agricultural production that was expected to be achieved at the end of ProSAVANA activities.

The corridor railways, therefore, are often emphasized as symbols representing integration, flow, and mobility. However, traveling by train is no straightforward endeavor. Passenger departure schedules have been progressively limited to just a few days each week, and as of late, 18 stations have been shuttered. Despite significant demand for transportation in the region, the government recognized the need to prioritize space for coal-laden wagons (Muitxs Outrxs 2017). Consequently, the peasants were left with few options for transportation, particularly in hilly areas already distant from the main roads. Given that rural communities are typically located far from primary commercial hubs and have limited mobility prospects, these households find themselves poorly connected to the market. As a result, the inhabitants of the Nampula, Zambézia, and Niassa provinces do not conform to the blueprint of a “logistical corridor” or align with the supply chain of a plantation ecology.

In March 2018, accompanied by a fellow sociologist, her partner, and our driver, I had the opportunity to visit Mutuali. This village had been a focal point for extension projects associated with ProSAVANA and was also where the land conflicts detailed by Filipe had concentrated. We intended to meet with Antônio, a UNAC advocacy agent in that locality. Upon arriving in the area and connecting with the peasant at the crossroads leading to Mutuali's marketplace, we journeyed with him along a muddy path, passing his residence nestled amongst a cluster of other mud-brick houses, machambas, and some livestock, en route to the old train station. This station, which had been shuttered in 2013, displayed considerable wear and tear, with encroaching vegetation gradually enveloping the remnants of the former railway infrastructure. Antônio noted that akin to other transportation hubs in Mozambique, this site was once a bustling center for the exchange of produce from local peasants, given the substantial influx of people. During our conversation, numerous individuals traversed the trails using improvised wooden bridges to cross. This activity only paused when the Vale train, carrying over 60 coal-loaded wagons, traversed the railway tracks.

Antonio emphasized his feeling that in Mutuali they were increasingly isolated and abandoned. The station ruins were a mark of this in the landscape of the locality, which added to the fact that the roads were quite precarious – a legacy of years of anti-colonial conflict followed by a long civil war. “I don't think they count on the human beings who live here, along the corridor,” he said, evaluating the new undertakings that arrived in the region. According to Kato (2019), the formation of development corridors has promoted the combination of logistical structures with specific policies aimed at unblocking capital flows and allowing the circulation of commodities. However, what we observed at the territorial level is that people and their agriculture are increasingly settled and restricted to a certain space, while conditions are created for commodities to circulate and cross borders on a global scale.

While the intensification of this scenario is evident with the influx of megaprojects in the northern region of the country, it is not a recent development; rather, it intersects with the historical process of Mozambican nation-building, similar to the railways. Against the backdrop of a civil war, in 1987, during a period of profound change, the nation embraced the structural adjustment policies advocated by the IMF and the World Bank. Consequently, the former socialist-planned economy shifted towards market liberalization, leading to the emergence of a business sector as state-owned enterprises underwent privatization. Nonetheless, the economic recovery program yielded limited improvements in the living conditions of the impoverished rural population (Mosca 2008). As recounted by Filipe and Antônio regarding the present state of the corridor, West (2008) highlights that since the 1990s, the government of the country began to operate as if the region were devoid of inhabitants:

The government privatized companies and auctioned some of the most valuable national assets to foreign investors (…). As a result of this situation, state power has disinvested as never before in the productivity of Mozambicans. Needing nothing from the people, the state offered them nothing. Outside of electoral campaigns, the state demonstrated an almost total disinterest in “cultivating people” and their productive power. (West 2008, 358)

However, during my visits to communities grappling with land conflicts, I came to realize that the peasants within the Nacala Corridor had developed their own “logistics” to facilitate their mobility and organization. As I delved deeper into the resistances and struggles against the ProSAVANA program, I discerned a history of collaborations between transnational social movements, intricately interwoven with the very formation of a peasant social movement in Mozambique. Motivated by this, I established contact with Diamantino Nhampossa, the former director of UNAC, and Ismail Ossemane, the organization's honorary president, seeking to glean further insights into this historical narrative.

Ossemane highlighted learning and the new connections established between peasants, academics, and organizations that supported them during the period of economic restructuring. He narrated the clashes they had with the government so that the country's lands were not privatized and how this process showed that “(…) it was inevitable that they would have to organize themselves, so the National Union of Peasants was formed” in 1993. And UNAC “(…) was a struggle organization [organização de luta]. It can support and have the support of NGOs, but it maintains this principle that it is an organization of peasants.” Founded as a movement independent of FRELIMO⁹, it was hoped that such an organization would be able to make decisions to better represent the peasants, especially with the emergence of wealthy party elites.

Since the creation of UNAC, one of its main objectives has been to strengthen grassroots forms of organization, constituting leaderships (the companheiros and advocacy agents). The need to “reorganize the grassroots,” as one of the last presidents of the organization, Agusto Mafigo, proposed, aimed at improving the living conditions of rural communities, strengthening their ways of farming and using the land, as well as consolidating their potential for political advocacy. Unlike the posture assumed by FRELIMO, this embryonic peasant movement began to “cultivate people.” Therefore, UNAC has branched out into provincial and district unions, which lead to this work of mediation closer to its “grassroots.” During my visit to the headquarters of the UPC-Nampula companheiro Vicente also told me a little more about this branching stage of the movement:

I want to say that this provincial union was formed in April 2014. We peasants in Nampula province were feeling that we were not safe because we were not well represented (…) We were feeling that we have many associations, but each association was depending on an organization (…). When the contract for that partnership ended, that association soon disappeared. So, we started feeling that, eh pá, we are not fine, we were not safe. We had to have a pillar, an organization that represents the peasants at the level of Nampula province. This is how our story began. (Vicente, peasant, president of the UPC-Nampula 2017)

In this way, the UPCs were responsible for presenting the demands of the peasants to the different levels of Mozambican government authorities, as well as for reporting the main issues encountered no terreno [on the ground] to UNAC. Vicente concluded: “This is the provincial union office, but the provincial union is not here. The provincial union is there on the ground. The provincial union is the peasant there. Here is just an office. The provincial union is there in the community,” he concluded (Figure 3).

Figure 3. UPC-Nampula meeting with a community facing a land conflict. Source: Record made in the field.

Nevertheless, it was still necessary to create alliances with organizations and movements from other parts of the world. Nhampossa pointed to the year 1998 as the beginning of UNAC's internationalization process when a Brazilian delegation from the MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers) visited the country. “It was in the year of preparing for Rio + 10 that the MST paid a visit to movements in Southern Africa and arrived in Mozambique. It was at that time that we started a conversation about the importance of the international peasant movement.” After an initial period of “experience exchanges,” not only with the MST but with organizations in Latin America and Asia, UNAC became the representative organization of Via Campesina on the African continent.

According to Nhampossa, this contact with other movements also made it possible to develop the conceptual framework that justified UNAC's decision of promoting an autonomous peasant movement, and the definition of a “common struggle” agenda put them in a good position to “massify the movement” on the African continent. A second effect of these transnational articulations was the promotion of technical improvements to guarantee an increase in peasant production, without compromising their “food sovereignty.” According to the former director of UNAC, “(…) in addition to these international political struggles, there were many exchanges in the area of seeds” with Brazilian organizations that are part of or technically support Via Campesina, such as the MST itself, MPA and IBASE (Brazilian Institute of Economic and Social Analysis), so that peasants could exchange knowledge and farming experiences.

Although, Ossemane made the caveat that “When we were at the Via Campesina meetings, that was exciting, we all left there already organized,” but “When you go to the grassroots you discover that there are problems, it is not that same beautiful macro issues” exposed in international forums. For him, after seeking to exchange experiences with other organizations, they should always find an adequate language to take what they learned to the reality of the country's rural environment. In this sense, part of the luta was to constitute leaders who could work in the communities in their local languages and thus “send a message.” That is what they recognized as UNAC's role when the news came about a new development cooperation program:

ProSAVANA, I think it was a very strong project that did not look like it was going to fail, but it did. Because there was a lot of coordination between various movements. Including the so-called Japanese and Brazilian civil society. They coordinated to avoid a disaster in the case of ProSAVANA. (…) I think this would not have been possible if the African peasant movements were not articulated and if they did not have international connections, with organizations with the same thinking, with the same struggle approach. (Nhampossa, former director of UNAC, Maputo, 2018)

The activist did not exclude the need for UNAC to foster links with international organizations “so as not to wake up and be surrounded,” but for Nhampossa too, UNAC as a central office should not replace the role that each peasant must play daily no terreno, “because there will not be enough army of lawyers to solve these problems.” Therefore, both the local and transnational articulation that the movement has been building are paramount for communities to be able to face global challenges. Assemblages such as Via Campesina and the “South-South Cooperation of Peoples” allow their movements to cross the scales of different corridors, despite the framings and fixations imposed by the plantation ecology.

4. Final thoughts

Following the implementation of the ProSAVANA program between 2014 and 2020, I could grasp how three allegories of connection and flow were triggered by actors differently entangled in this project to transform agriculture in northern Mozambique. They are the notions of parallels, chains, and corridors. Thus, I have described some ways in which such allegories can be seen as expressions of a plantation ecology, the designs of which operate scalable forms of simplification, standardization, and equivalence of relationships in different territories.

However, by detailing the various struggles that interwove with the ProSAVANA implementation – encompassing a South-South Cooperation of the Peoples, tactics against sedentariness, a grassroots scientific approach, and a diverse-scaled peasant movement – I delineated certain reconfigurations of these global constructs stemming from the contentions and uprisings of those affected by this plantation ecology. In contrast to projects of des-envolvimento, these lutas evoke mutual entanglements. Through a “re-grounded” examination of the plantation ecology, we can thus discern emerging forms of resistance, which steer practices within a relational mode of existence, enabling us to envision potential trajectories for the plantation's future:

(…) fostering relational modes of being demands that narratives of social and ecological death, decay, and destruction must be emphasized and also further understood as fertile ground containing possibilities for life, wellness, and wholeness emerging from collective struggle. (…) This often involves breaches of power as norms, rules, and law must be transgressed. Thus, taking risks and striving collectively is necessary for cultivating relationships across differences. (Davis et al. 2019, 10)

Such assemblages towards a “plot-life” establish (re)compositions as they differentiate ecologies and relationships against the des-envolvimento, as shown by the lutas described in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Grant Number 9470].

Notes on contributors

Vanessa Parreira Perin

Vanessa P. Perin holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of São Carlos – São Paulo Brazil, developing research on the soybean supply chain and its techno-financial mechanisms for the continued expansion of the agricultural frontier through agribusiness.

Notes

1 Characterized as Savanna in the international classification, this biome constitutes the second largest Brazilian vegetation formation. Usually located in landscapes of extensive plateaus, its soils are old, deep, drained, and acidic, which does not impede the biome to show extremely diverse vegetation.

2 The research was supported by the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Brazilian Higher Education Personnel Improvement Coordination [Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior] (CAPES).

3 During these journeys through the Nacala Corridor I was able to visit the city of Nampula, the districts of Nacala Porto, Monapo (Monapo Vila and Netia locality), Erati Namapa, Ribaué, Malema (Malema Vila and Mutuali locality), Gurué and the city of Lichinga. In total, I visited 10 peasant communities and performed 53 interviews (some collective ones), in addition to many other moments of less formalized conversations and interactions with the various interlocutors (members of civil society, peasants, technicians, researchers, academics, government officials, diplomats, businessmen) with whom I kept in touch through visits to their offices or other workplaces and at events. All names mentioned throughout the article have been changed in order to maintain the anonymity of my interlocutors.

4 Land in Mozambique is state-owned, but it can be used by individual or collective private actors through an annual tax for fifty years, renewable for an equal period. For that, it is necessary to apply for a DUAT (Right to Use and Benefit from Land) and submit an investment proposal to the Mozambican government. Furthermore, peasant communities spread throughout the country have the right to traditional use and enjoyment of their lands (Mandamule 2017).

5 Meaning something like disentanglement. A play on words made by Marta, since des-envolvimento resonates with the word desenvolvimento [development] in Portuguese.

6 It is worth mentioning that some associations and cooperatives of small producers accepted to participate in the extension projects brought by ProSAVANA, despite expressing fears about the announced possibility of land grabbing. In the Lichinga region, for example, peasants and organizations that represented them seemed more open to the program activities than in Nampula city on the other side of the Nacala Corridor.

7 Historically, different projects of power in Mozambique have been against the peasants’ dispersed way of living. As pointed out by Gallo (2016), in the socialist rural planning projects, as well as the colonial settlements, the old land as a space for harvesting, cults, houses, corrals, and trees was replaced by an exclusively productive space, formatted by fences and aligned plots of land. However, the population developed several strategies to deny the colonial settlements and communal villages, the “government machambas.”

8 As Tsing states, this “plantation science” guides us to work for total control of plants and crops. Thus, “managers and experts, working together, must be able to manipulate relevant humans and non-humans” (2019, 59) to control indeterminacy. Furthermore, by making compositions with indetermination a “peasant science” would be closer to those practices and knowledge of traditional agricultural systems described by Carneiro Da Cunha (2017) and Morim De Lima et al. (2018): marked by a high level of heterogeneity, diversity, and dynamic adaptation of crops to the environment. They are also driven by principles (food, medicinal, artisanal, etc.) other than the maxim of productivity, traits of scientific/industrial logic of commercial agriculture.

9 The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) was the movement that led the anti-colonial struggle and which today is configured as a political party, having been at the head of the main positions of the Mozambican government for 40 years.