Food policy and production in Mozambique since independence

Mozambique's food crisis is one of the most disastrous in Africa. Undeniably a result of systematic South African destabilisation, and made worse in the last years by drought, it has its origins in the colonial structure of agriculture and the shock of the sudden Portuguese exodus at Independence. But the paper explores, as Frelimo's 1983 Fourth Congress did, whether policy choices have not made matters worse. Attention is drawn to the last few years’ emphasis on the former settler sector, its conversion to complex, costly and not very productive state farms; to low prices of food, to sustain an essentially Portuguese urban diet — all to the detriment of peasant farming.