Catharsis

We arrive in Ruace, in the district of Gurué, Nampula province. Behind us, to the left, are the fields that, in other times, used to feed the villagers who live here. Today they are covered in soya. This is the visible legacy of the “sugarcoated promises” made by the intensive agriculture company, Hoyo Hoyo. The bustling streets are a sign that Sunday mass is about to start; only the 44 people meeting in the old school building break this routine. Ten years later, having lost everything they had to lose, their fear of talking has vanished. They no longer try to filter their revolt in any way, they want to “let it all out”.

The same stories were repeated, over and over again, like carbon copies of one another. A collective catharsis which went on for three hours. All those present at the meeting were former workers at Urari Kapel, a public company that started to produce maize, beans, sunflowers and soya after Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975. It went bankrupt a short time later, with the intensification of the Civil War that started in 1977. At that time, the people who were left unemployed took over responsibility for the land, with the blessing of the government: “A provincial agricultural extension group came and split the land among the workers themselves. We started to produce, more and more... We spent 30 years producing here. When those lot came in, all the land was clear. People could get the tractors in, they worked the land... We worked from the moment Kapel left until they came in.” Baptista Frisado, 54 years, never calls Hoyo Hoyo by its name, as if avoiding it could make it less real.

12 August 2008 – even now, peasant farmers from Ruace can still describe, in detail, the Tuesday they met with representatives from the local government and the agribusiness company. The day when, they remember, Hoyo Hoyo entered their village with a “policy of sweeteners” and guaranteed that if they left the 136 associations they belonged to and went to work for the company, they would increase production. “They said that they wanted to make an experimental field to promote soya production and that they would be our local buyers,” remembers Teresa Augusto, 43. “They promised to help us cultivate the machambas [smallholdings] so that we would increase our production and be using advanced agriculture. We were very happy. We celebrated. But that was ten years ago and nothing. Nothing...,” adds Baptista.

“Clearly we have two opposing standpoints. On the one hand, the communities’ great concern is food production, to respond to the problem of hunger and to secure income to pay for other services such as education and health. On the other hand, companies mainly produce food that is destined for outside the region where it is grown. They choose crops that don’t respond to the needs of the people, that are intended instead for export, that don’t contribute to the fight against food shortages at all. The argument that they are creating local work is also a fallacy. A peasant’s piece of land is, on average, 1.2 hectares and it provides for a whole family. A company generates, on average, five jobs per 1000 hectares. This means that, for every five new jobs, nearly 800 families are left without employment. Because the land where they grew their crops is their own self-employment,” explains Vicente Adriano from Acção Académica para o Desenvolvimento das Comunidades Rurais (ADECRU: Academic Action for Rural Community Development).

Hoyo Hoyo [which in Changana, one of the languages from the south of Mozambique, means, “welcome”] is a company registered in Mozambique since 2008. It is a subsidiary of Quifel Resources, controlled by Miguel Pais do Amaral, businessman, racing driver and descendent of Portuguese aristocracy.

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After the Government had approved the exploitation of 28 thousand hectares in the provinces of Zambézia and Tete, the company was sold and registered as Hoyo One in Mauritius - a well-known tax haven - and passed to the control of Hoyo Hoyo B. V., which has its headquarters in Holland. Both belong to the BXR Group, of the Netherlands, run by bankers with funds linked to Credit Suisse and the Czech businessman Zdenel Bakala, who has an estimated fortune of 1.6 billion euros, according to Forbes magazine. The report “The Land Grabbers of the Nacala Corridor”, published by Grain, a development NGO, includes this information and adds that before 2012, the year in which the company passed to the hands of BXR Group, people had already been evicted from their lands, but that investment in production was zero.

The Ruace peasants were resettled in Moja, a mountainous region more than four hours from the village by foot. They were never allowed back into the area which had been promised to them as experimental cultivation plots. Even the cemetery, where they used to hold wakes for their dead, is now fenced off. “They say that there’s lots of available space, that there’s no reason for conflict, but if there is so much free land why is it that they want the exact place the peasants are? Why don’t they go out into the bush where they resettled them?” asks Vicente Adriano, the person in charge of ADECRU. Hardly stopping to take a breath, he continues to give the response: “Because they don’t want to clear the bush, they want fertile land, land that has been cultivated, with water.”

“Since 2011, none of us have brought back a basket of maize from there [Moja]. Not even 10 kilos of soya. When it rains, these lands turn into a swamp. In 2011, we found ourselves in poverty. In 2012, we found ourselves in poverty. In 2013, we found ourselves in poverty. In 2014, when we found ourselves in poverty again, we decided to rent another piece of land,” Teresa tells us. She complains of the low fertility of the soils and the conflicts with other peasants who claim to have the right to the same lands.

Being in poverty is working for months on the fields and not managing to bring food home because the land is arid. Berta Assane, 61 years old, didn’t take long to realise that she would have to turn the other way. “I abandoned that, it didn’t benefit me, I was suffering for nothing. The 1500 meticais [20 euros] that the company gave me as compensation helped me to get another piece of land next to Niassa [province that borders with Zambézia]. When I go there, I spend days far from home, it is impossible to go there and back in a day. Before I was only a few minutes from my plot,” she tells us. Berta and Teresa have already given in, they gave up the plot where they were resettled.

Arminda Ambrósio looks over at her friends and says that she would like to do the same but doesn’t have the money. At 42 years old and a mother of nine children, three of whom died, she complains: “I shouldn’t be in this situation now. […] The kids used to go to school because I had money. I produced maize, soya and could sell it. My children even had new clothes. Now I have nothing. I have no way of buying books, notepads, pens; nothing to pay for the inscription fee. I just don’t. They are at home, and they stay there. Sitting there.”

Peasants had already asked the local government time and again to legally recognise the land where the associations had worked for nearly 30 years. The response was always the same: “the land belongs to the State, it cannot be sold.” “Why has our father betrayed us?” The question is rhetorical, but, even so, repeated to exhaustion. As if some solution could be found in the answer. The “father” they talk about is the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO: Mozambique Liberation Front), the party which has been in power since the country gained independence. The same revolutionary movement that fought against colonialism, that fought for peasants to have access to the land, is now using them “as bait to catch fish”. These are the words of Custódio Mulotiba: “the former local political leader came as the bait, with a policy of sweeteners, and dominated us. He told us that, after the company opened, he would stay here for two years, but he never once slept here. He lives in Maputo, he lives a good life... It’s us who are still here. There is a proverb that says that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers [when the powerful fight, it’s the weak who suffer].”

“There is a historic reason for this. After the independente, in a context in which we couldn’t flee imperialist influence, but we didn’t want the country’s resources to be raided in their entirety by external capital, a national bourgeoisie came into being, which protected Mozambique’s resources. And who is more patriotic than those who fought for the freedom of their homeland? The first wave of expropriation was carried out by the State to bring about the emergence of this group of owners. It wasn’t successful. Subsequently, many of these companies became obsolete: the funding systems were inadequate, there were no support services for business rehabilitation. The link with foreign capital became a viable option for various reasons: they are multi-nationals that dominate international markets, they have technology, reputations, experience...

The biggest problem is that passing the scarcely available resources over to multi-nationals meant that the Mozambican oligarchical capitalist bourgeoisie would lose in the process. To prevent this, they linked the entrance of foreign capital to the development of domestic capital. It is not by chance that there was an enormous campaign promoting the riches of Mozambique, ‘we have gas, we have petrol, we have coal, we have minerals’,” explains Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco, Mozambican economist and researcher at the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos [Institute of Social and Economic Studies].

And he continues: “the way in which domestic capital and foreign capital were linked was to place the first to negotiate with the second. But for this process to take place without additional costs, the State had to renounce its sources of income: mines, resources, it was all made available at low cost, making any business favourable.”

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The Ruace peasants are experiencing first hand this blurring of the lines that should separate the actions of the State from those of private interest. The peasants know that they are embroiled in a fight akin to David and Goliath but, even so, they refuse to hand over something that they are sure is theirs. In October 2016, they again confronted Hoyo Hoyo and the political leader of the sub-district of Lioma with a letter in which they asked for answers regarding the promises that had been made to them.

Over a year later, they are still waiting. When contacted, the then political leader of Lioma, João José Nwole, and Gordon Cameron, the director of agricultural investments at Hoyo Hoyo, agreed to explain their side of the story and break the silence that has slowly been destroying any trace of hope that the peasants had; all they want is for what was promised to them to be delivered.

“It’s a human right to have a smallholding!” Teresa doesn’t doubt that the right to have a piece of land on which to grow should form part of one of the 30 Articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, says that every human being should have access “to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care [...]”. But Berta, Teresa and Arminda can’t imagine how this can be possible without first guaranteeing the ground from which everything else can be obtained: “The Land Law was created so that Mozambicans could exploit their own lands and now we are going hungry. Before, we ate four meals a day - mata-bicho [breakfast], lunch, afternoon snack and dinner, but now we can’t. We are wasting away,” they complain.

Berta believes that the antidote to break with the “curse” that fell on Ruace is within Mozambique, at the hands of the President Filipe Nyusi, rather than in universal solutions, or in faraway voices: “If he were closer, we could go on foot. We would sleep on the way until we got there, to where our President is. That way, we could tell him what is happening, what we have seen, what we are feeling.”