“Mozambique's movement to end land grabs: interview with Anabela Lemos”, 2 March 2016
...In Mozambique, where 80% of the population is campesinos...companies are taking the...most fertile land and moving people to land that can't grow anything...[T]he coal mining project in the Tete province relocated people from the fertile soil by the Zambezi River, with the promise of houses and two hectares of land per family. They were moved to an arid place with land that can only grow stones, as they say, losing access to the land and river their lives depended on. When a foreign company wants to extract..., the government grants them the rights, claiming ownership of whatever is beneath the ground. Legally, these extractive projects need to be accepted by the communities, but the legal system doesn't work properly. Activists in Mozambique formed Justiça Ambiental [JA] in 2004 to address issues of food, water, mining, extraction, forests, and energy as they relate to the climate crises...We organize to support farmers and communities...and demand that our government does not jump on the GMO bandwagon. We work on leveraging legal support for communities in the struggle against mining, despite repeated instances of our cases being turned down in the courts. We are still...fight[ing]...to stop the Mphanda Nkuwa dam from being built...Mozambique has seen a huge increase in land-grabbing and foreign investment in agriculture and natural resources,...with pollution and climate change. The government decided that poverty and hunger would be solved by agribusiness,...Every time a corporation takes land from a campesino farmer, it leads to poverty...In the Nacala Corridor...the government offered free land to an agribusiness [venture] from Brazil, Japan and Mozambique. Known as ProSavana, the monoculture project would export soy and other cash crops to Japan. [The four million] campesino farmers in the Nacala Corridor would face massive land grabs. No information was given to Mozambicans; we only found out through international civil society organizations...
[It refers to Dupont, Monsanto and Syngenta]
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