The government says the country will soon stop importing rice, but for analysts, over the next four years, this will not be possible without measures to protect domestic production and price support for agricultural inputs and equipment.
By this means, according to officials, Mozambique will be able to save $200 million annually, “thanks to a new approach that the Ministry of Agriculture is implementing in the country.”
“Mozambique does have the conditions to stop importing rice, because it has land, water and climate, and the question is whether it will be in a short time or not. But I think that in the next four years, we will still be far from doing it,” said Arnaldo Ribeiro, a specialist and consultant in the area of rice production.
Mozambique continues to import about 500,000 tons of husked rice per year and the country should be producing less than 300,000 tons of paddy rice, Ribeiro said.
Ribeiro says there are several constraints, including working with peasants with half a hectare of land, and it is necessary to train them to be able to increase productivity to between five and six tons.
Private investment
“This is not done overnight; it requires several years of work and starts from research to seed production and distribution, and these things are not yet well organized; we don’t have large producers of certified rice seed, and our input distribution network is not yet structured and well organized throughout the country,” he said.
Another constraint pointed out by that consultant is related to private investment “that doesn’t come because of the land.”
He stressed that “despite saying that we have a lot of land, this is a very big problem that national and foreign investors face; they have to take a long time looking for land, because they have to fulfill all that route foreseen in the Land Law, which is often a very time-consuming process and they end up giving up.”
“What is even more important is that we will not be able, without measures to support the price of production factors, that is, of inputs and equipment, to compete with the large world rice producers, such as Thailand, India, Vietnam and others, which are countries with a much more developed private sector.
For his part, the technical coordinator of the Rural Environment Observatory, João Feijó, says that in this rice issue, there are aspects linked to importation and commercialization that the Government should review.
And the analyst Alexandre Chiure says that Mozambique has conditions to stop importing rice, “because it has three million hectares of arable land, has plenty of water and plenty of manpower to produce not only rice but also other crops, what is missing are policies for the development of the agricultural sector.
Country Projects to Commercialize More than 16 Million Tons of Miscellaneous Food Products
The country projects to commercialize, this year, more than 16 million tons of various food products out of an overall production of more than 22 million tons.
The quantity may earn agricultural producers, throughout the national territory, about 150 million dollars, equivalent to nearly 975 billion meticais.
The information was provided, in Quelimane, by the Director-General of the Mozambican Grains Institute (ICM), Mohamed Valá.
