Fields of Opportunity Mozambican farmers turn to rice production with Chinese cooperation
It’s late afternoon in one of the least developed provinces on the African continent, with the fifth highest unemployment rate. Young people shake hands in the streets and say goodbye with promises to see each other the next day. Their downcast facial expressions, dirty clothes and empty lunch boxes reflect the tiredness of another day’s work that has come to an end. But although tired, they are some of the lucky few who do have jobs.
Among these young people is 22-year-old Lucilio Machava. He is one of more than 150 employees of the Wanbao Africa Agriculture
Development Ltd. (WAADL) project - one of the largest rice producers in Mozambique. The project was the result of a partnership between the Mozambican Government and the Chinese company Wanbao. Machava, like many young people in Gaza, Mozambique’s second-poorest province, is the only male in a family of five, making him responsible for putting food on the table. This forced him to drop out of high school, with only two years left to finish, at the beginning of last year. With no other options, he had to go out and look for work to help feed his mother, his 15-year-old sister, his wife and their baby.
Scarce opportunities
According to UNESCO statistics, the unemployment rate in Mozambique stands at 25 percent, almost half of whom are young people with at least basic education. This means people like Machava have problems in finding work.
He said that he was unemployed for four months before finding a job at Wanbao in April 2018. He has since risen up the ranks to become a supervisor in the company’s rice warehouse ventilation system.
“Before working at Wanbao, I was doing nothing. We all depended on my mother’s
crops on her little farm and that wasn’t enough for everyone,” he said.
According to Jaime Cumbane, Editor of the Annual Newsletter of the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security, by the end of 2018, in Mozambique, there were 180,000 newly unemployed people, 9,000 of whom were from Gaza, compared with only about 3,500 jobs created in the same period in the province.
A case study by the China-africa Development Fund released in July 2019 stated that the Wanbao Mozambique Rice Farm project in Xai Xai, Gaza Province, is currently the largest Chinese rice planting project in Africa and one of 13 key projects on capacity cooperation between China and Mozambique. The project occupies 20,000 hectares and integrates farm land development, grain production, warehousing, processing and sales, with a focus on rice cultivation. In total, 15,000 farming households have been trained in rice planting, according to the survey, which has seen local yields rise from 1.5 tons per hectare to 7 tons per hectare in seven years.
Mozambique is a country with great agricultural potential. About 70 percent of its land is suitable for agriculture. Despite the fact that many agricultural researchers are trained, the rapid growth of the global agrarian industry has forced the government to create international partnerships, mainly with China, to maximize land use and exchange experiences in this area.
“Among the more than 457,000 jobs created in 2018 by the 32 largest sectors in the country, agriculture was responsible for generating at least 80,000 jobs, with a large margin of difference with other sectors,” said Cumbane.
Job creation
According to Margarida Madureira, Representative of Paz y Desarrollo, a consulting organization working in civil society and NGO sectors, Wanbao is responsible for the creation of 400 direct and 1,500 indirect jobs in Mozambique.
Most of these jobs are available at the end of the year, especially in Novemberjanuary, the period when Wanbao does fertilizing and seed planting. Also in the harvest season in the middle of the year, there has been a greater number of hires.
Students Zefanias João, 21, and Mário Alfredo, 19, are both seasonal hires. In November 2019, they submitted their documents early to the company for hiring purposes.
In Mozambique, schools close curricular activities for the year in October and “because of this, I can work without missing my classes,” added Alfredo.
Setting an example
WAADL has become one of the most desired companies at Mozambique’s agriculture fairs because it produces locally and sells its products locally.
In 2016, the Chinese company was ranked first in the category of Best Small and Medium Manufactured Products Company at the award event of the Mozambique Agro-commercial and Industrial Fair (FACIM), the largest agricultural exhibition in Mozambique that has participants from more than 20 countries.
At the last two FACIM events, Wanbao broke sales records, selling all its produce two days before the fair closed.
Madureira said WAADL has the stated objective of promoting the transfer of technology to increase agricultural productivity.
“This project is explicitly part of the
Mozambican Government’s Strategic Plan for Agrarian Development and is supported by the existing twinning agreement between the Gaza Province in Mozambique and Hubei Province in China, signed in 1987,” said Madureira.
During Mozambique’s recent election campaign that ended on October 12, 2019, Jacinto Nyusi, reelected as president, promised that Gaza Province would transform Mozambican agriculture and elevate the country to become one of the major international players in the agriculture industry.
In order to achieve it, Nyusi vowed to invest in the training of young people interested in agronomy by “sending them to study at Chinese universities,” as well as creating exchanges between national and international companies.
Agrarian extension (the application of scientific research and new knowledge to agricultural practices through farmer education) is another option to develop agricultural activity. In this regard, the government plans to increase the training and hiring of experts so that they can help farmers improve the quality and quantity of their production. CA