 Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you for wider for this chance. This is a rather very introductory talk that I'm making here today. It's closer to a conceptual note than proper to result with resulting findings and so forth. But I do hope that it has still some value or it makes it still some sense to be here talking to you today. First of all because we are trying to shed some light into Proscevana which is nowadays one of the most controversial development cooperation programs in northern Mozambique that is taking place in northern Mozambique and it's maybe one of the most controversial development cooperation programs in Africa nowadays. And second because we are trying to establish or re-establish do a review of the literature and re-establish some critical elements that we believe that exist between contract farming and inclusive growth in Africa. Contract farming as many of you know has re-emerged as a popular solution given by different donor communities and by different multilateral institutions especially as a response to the claims against land grabbing. Well for those who have been following Mozambique recent development path this is quite very obvious and familiar. Mozambique has been experiencing very high levels of GDP growth average eight percent a year from the past 20 years rates have been especially stable in the past decade. It has been what we call donor darling has received more aid per capita than equivalent countries in terms of human development index. It has experienced a recent oppressive boom in times of FDI here. For the first time the levels of FDI they have surpassed the levels of official development assistance but extreme poverty has not been declining anymore in one of the poorest countries of the world of course especially coming from a session where we are discussing the quality of these status and in case of Mozambique the last data that we have available the last survey that we have available is from 2008 2009 which was especially a bad year in terms of agricultural production and for sure that affects the comparison base that we had before but it's still other indicators like child malnutrition both chronic and and an acute they haven't shown much progress in recent in the recent years. What we know is that growth has been linked to a few foreign invested MAGA projects they're quite important in the case of the Mozambican development path especially in gas and mineral sector they're capital intensive they rely a lot on they export most of their production they have very few linkages to the national economy and also very few linkages to the national budget during because of widespread fiscal extensions and what we also know it's quite clear from the recent development path picture of Mozambique agriculture has clearly been lacking behind productivity has stagnated food production per capita has also been quite quite disappointing a technical progress is totally has has also stagnated if you check the number of extensionists available it has also stagnated in this context there was the emergency of Rosavana which proposes a solution to this investment problem in the in Mozambican agriculture and it proposes to bring in a new framework or a new development model for the agricultural sector in Mozambique and to lift up agricultural sector there it's a trilateral development cooperation program it involves the government of japan brazil and and Mozambique uh in the Nakala corridor involves three provinces and 19 districts and should affect the life of 4.3 million people and a colleague of mine was just saying that it represents also something around nine percent of the uh cultivated area in the country it has three components one is technological transfer that's the company that is the component that is quite well advanced it's being carried out by a brazilian uh research agricultural research institution state owned and which has an office in in in Mozambique for quite a long time the general idea is that Brazil has developed tropical agricultural technology that could be replicated in Africa and the more people using it more value it would have so a brazilian government is is supporting that quite quite strongly the second component uh this first company has started in 2011 and should last for at least six years then there is a second component of elaboration of a master plan that is going to give the general guide guidelines for agricultural development in the region it was supposed to be finished in this year in uh uh now in august it was delayed to next year because of a lot of pressure and a lot of criticism to the program so far and a new development models and extension that has just started it it's in its formulation phase now so in total it's a long term project it's 20 years program 20 years and it's inserted in a large web of private infrastructure projects public as well that are taking place uh in the region and a number of land deals that are also taking place in the same region these investments well there's a number of them here but two key actors one of them is valley which is the second biggest mining company in the world it's brazilian owned and it operates a coal mine uh in the lock land province of tet and it's also responsible for operating the railroad that crosses the Nakala corridor and it's investing on the rehabilitation it's building a new path that it's going to cross Malawi and it's working on the rehabilitation of of the whole of the whole way it's over 900 kilometers also a number of roads are being are being um either constructed or renewed this this one is is quite advanced and um it's financed with the with the japanese financing lines also linked to to to process the valley uh another important thing is a uh a phosphate mine that is also owned by valley and that they hope that once agricultural projects are doing well in the region they will be able to supply uh fertilizers to the farmers in the region well and a number of other ones uh and also some land investments that are taking place with more and more pace in the region there is a project that is in its elaboration phase and it's being carried out by FGV projectus with the same brazilian consulting company that is working for the master plan of pro savanna and they're building what they call the Nakala fund it's supposed to be it hopes to raise two billion dollars in 10 years to finance agri-business investors interesting in investing in the corridor it has promoted a couple of road shows in brazil it has taken a couple of investors to actually not a couple but 70 brazilian agri-business investors to to mosambique and it has uh it started the process of um of uh of uh of road show so uh however the program has been highly contested so far by national mosambican civil society as well with links with some international and brazilian social movements including the most recent one there is a number of different uh uh open letters or but the most recent one it's a common open letter written by 13 different national organizations in even which they call for the immediate uh suspension and revision of of the program it's addressed to the presidents of brazil mosambique and the prime minister of of japan um well we i say this is extremely preliminary because uh the first our first the first phase of our research it took us about two months to do some qualitative work in terms of data collection and interviews uh we were doing another thing more related to political science to compare the discourse of south south development cooperation to its actual practice in the field and uh we came out with uh some critical aspects in the formulation of the program some previous researchers have already highlighted some of the points that we confirm uh first of all it's the very low level of transparency it's very hard to get any material from the project um for example the last version that we got of the master plan it was leaked through by by civil society uh there is a big difficulty in coordination between brazilian and uh and japanese teams uh now that the program is facing a number of difficulties it became popular that one team is blaming the other for the for for the problems but also we found in the process of elaboration of the programs a lot of inconsistencies between what would be the desirable targets elemental targets in terms of land concentration or land systems that would they would like to promote and a high degree of incoherence is in the project documents and discourse for example a typical one that's that in the beginning they were arguing that a prosavana would be a replica of protocere which was a program for the development of sehado in brazil in the seventies that was financed by the japanese government uh once it's about the same latitude the conditions technically in the beginning they thought would be the same and blah blah blah later on they were highly criticized for this because it's an area with very high land concentration in brazil so they understood that okay so we are going to replicate the huge plantations to to to mosambic and they came back and said no no no no it's not a replica of protocere they rebute all the all the discourse and now all the effort it's it's trying to to to disconnect prosavana from protocere we also found that there is a huge lack of a participatory approach actually this is not at all a consideration from the program the master plan had so far being elaborated by the japanese and the brazilian consulting teams with very limited participation from local communities and civil societies uh there started to be some presentations to the local communities and beginning of this year we followed some of them uh but the methodology has been mainly spreading information and the consultings they speak openly that they are they are resistant resisting to the to the criticism and trying to explain the program but nothing close to to to a proper participatory methodology there has been a marginal involvement of the of the mosambican government in the in the elaboration of the master plan this is confirmed by the three parts involved and from the brazilian perspective there has been an important space given to private actors in both uh or in in in policy formulation or personalization and in terms of south regulation uh well what does then what's the development strategy that is proposed by by this prosavana they follow a value chain approach so it's the establishment of clusters based on their cultural potential land use environmental constraints of different zones they do very carefully careful zoning of the area they have very interesting maps available uh and they aim to give it to the mosambican government so they can guide investors new investors that are coming according to land occupation and land availability availability so each cluster is to be set in motion by a punier corp project that the private company should develop and these calls these clusters usually they propose a combination of different land use systems from large-scale corporate agriculture business to family farming there are two exceptions that don't propose these combinations one is the cluster that is exclusively for family food production and another cluster that is exclusively for a large-scale plantation they're suggesting they design a cluster for 60 000 acutals for the production of maize, soybean, some flowers and poultry that would be a single investor which is huge for for a mosambican uh uh basis uh personally i don't believe that this will stay in the program it is one of the the the most criticized elements but the solution most often proposed by the program to couple these uh large-scale foreign investors without dispossessing automatically the small ones is contract farming so contract farming is the the the the the mainstream solution that they propose contract farming is a business model in which you have the central processing unit that established the network of out growers who supply a certain commodity according to conditions, privileges defined in a contract it can take various forms we have a vast list of experiences both in mosambican everywhere in south southeast asia and other parts of africa and in in in latin america sometimes the central unit has its own farm which it also produces and buys from the others from suppliers other times it's only a processor or only an exporter unit that doesn't doesn't produce or doesn't doesn't plant uh the expected advantages is that first of all the small producers would have a short market they would have access to inputs and technological assistance and higher stability of income or or in many cases higher income quite easily uh guaranteed the terms of such schemes they very considerably and these schemes have gained momentum again as part of the response of the wave of criticism against land grabbing large-scale as i said before there are large-scale for fdi are now presented as part of this response to low agricultural productivity in africa if coupled with schemes that allow the integration of small-scale farmers into this value chain however uh there are a number of uh intrinsic risks associated to contract farming that have been uh uh totally ignored by prosavana so far and i would say by most of the programs that uh propose these types of uh of schemes and our argument is that if the purpose is to have inclusive growth these schemes they need from right from the beginning to have a very careful modeling in a way that they can promote and can help to promote this type of uh uh pro poor results um our first uh uh risk and later on we will we're planning uh several uh different uh uh investigations to to to evaluate to a degree this is happening or not in the contract farming schemes that are happening in this in this zone in mosambic the first risk is related to food insecurity the risk of reduced marked food supplies affecting the regional food availability and prices this is especially concerning for people who are out of schemes once poorer farmers tend to be uh uh out of these schemes if the net availability of food decreases prices could go up and they would be the first one affected by by food insecurity so as i said given that non-participants are like to include the very poorest the scenario is quite quite especially concerning the exclusion of poorer farmers in the absence of this proper regulation support poorer farmers are often not not selected to become a contractor dependency and indebtedness the problem with debt is a quite important one one this once this inputs are typically advanced by the firm on credit to be repaid but with interest by the out grower the risk of in debt and indebtedness it's it's quite relevant you already know this is happening in some soya uh contract farming in in the corridor of nakala um disruption of cultivation methods it can be argued that this is not the case in mosambic once methods being used are extremely basic still but patterns that have emerged from optimal utilization of local available resources might be might be lost once the company leaves and the inherent power imbalance of contract farming that needs to be addressed in these schemes engendered various degrees of risk depending on farmers relative bargaining power also gender problems are often a result of these schemes uh in a context where poverty prevails no other commercial activities are given to local farmers uh and no mediator is brought in the dominant agent in the agri-food chain may be able to structure the operation it's on advantage so uh prasavana we are always a fitting example of this trend of this prescription of contract for farming as being a solution as a way to allow the interest of foreign direct investments without just possessing local farmers however if not designed with specifically proper growth contract farming can be a powerful mechanism leading to exclusive or excluding growth um prasavana has been marked by these three critical factors we have highlighted in in its formulating process and these uh um critical aspects they tend to aggravate these uh uh risks that are inherent to contract farming we can see some impacts already the dead demand side of agricultural policies which has been a very important demand from local civil society is totally missing from from prasavana the same happens with some agricultural methods especially related to native seeds that is something that brazil has quite advanced technology on that and the transmission is not happening though it's also demanding from from civil society muslim beacon civil society there has been no discussion over taxes over land used by foreigners although local academics in muslim big have been stressing the need to avoid fiscal incentives that mark the mega projects and in general terms the challenging task for designing schemes that set conditionality to foreign investors is strengthen the bargaining power of growers and define favorable terms for poor farmers are unlikely to materialize under the current planning and implementation practices of prasavana thank you