Chimoio: Mozambique’s bread basket feeling the effects of globalisation

By Heloise Emdon

Give Chimoio five years. Capital of the Manica Province in Mozambique, the breadbasket area for the country, will soon be a bustling town fusing together its economic and ecological opportunities with a throng of newcomers.

Already it is no sleepy town. As we stood in the yard of the Forestry and Wildlife department several radioed 4x4s were maneuvering past us to speed more than two hours up passed Sussundenga and into the forested mountains to assist community who had already lost nine cows to four marauding lions.

These lions have crossed the border from Zimbabwe where farm occupations have been done aggressively. Cut fences have resulted in predators moving into the Chimanamani reserve in Mozambique.

Hidden treasure, preserved by war, Monte Binga, the highest mountain in Mozambique is home to some 3000 peasant families, and a secret amongst backpackers. Only 50 tourists made it into the rugged terrain in the past year.

Fanning out from the mountain is a reserve area of 1740 km2, known as Chimanani meaning straight passage, which gets its name from the deep kloof below the mountain where the river runs through a clean fissure of rock about a 1000metere of sheer drop from the treacherous car track. Hidden in caves below and above the road are several untouched bushmen paintings.

Cremildo Rungo, Head of the Provincial Service of Forestry and Wildlife, says the lions are not the only new immigrants from Zimbabwe. The government has already signed a deal giving 1000 km2 lease to a Zimbabwean farmer who is relocating his tame elephants for safari rides and some buffalo, along with other wild life to establish a photographer’s safari here the foothills of Chimanimani.

Rich in agricultural land, and dominated by indigenous forests, the area has also managed to attract a large rose growing horticulturist opening another operation outside of Zimbabwe. By November cargo planes will be freighting 10 tons of roses a week to Holland. The Zimbabwe rose growing company has already employed 200 workers and is starting to work with small farmers around them who will grow, sell and select roses for export.

Apart from the nationalized colonial citrus estates on the way to Gondola, this will be the most intensive farming the region has seen.

Rungo says he has five more applications he is dealing with. Mostly South Africans and Zimbabweans wanting to start wildlife farms in the area. The deals will involve land leases for 50 years, renewable, and conservancy practice requirements.

In the same office building is Tom Durang, Natural Resource Management Adviser, working on behalf of the multi-lateral donor ProAgri programme. He is posted there by the Danish Government and advises and facilitates inter-governmental coordination amongst Mozambican departments. The programme is itself the effort of donor-co-ordination on behalf of the multi-lateral agricultural aid coming from the EU, the World Bank, DFID and others in an effort to deliver well-planned agricultural development aid.

The Manican’s are clearly proud of their natural heritage, but the pressure of resource poor people settling back into peace-time in Mozambique has brought its own fair share of resource management issues.

The forest is under pressure from the community who can earn $1.50 from a bag of charcoal. Cutting an entire tree and burning it to create charcoal which they can sell as far a field as Beira on the coast, can earn a household $15. It is a week’s work. Ironically the high voltage wires from Cahora Bassa snake their way through the forest, over the heads of the people below, to deliver power to South Africa. An effigy of typical development problems: politics and distribution.

The logging pressure on this natural resource caught the imagination of one Derek Wilson, former head of Ford Foundation in Mozambique, who facilitated funding for the Department of Forestry and Wildlife to start involving the community in managing its own resources.

The project rolled-out hand-held Motorola radio’s, antennas, repeaters, solar panel cells, 4x4 trucks, uniforms and training for forest and wildlife guards as well as for community guards. Initially a 120 community members were trained and paid small stipends for guarding and policing strips of forest from unlawful logging and poaching. They would teach community members to cut trees of no less than 40 cm in diameter and then only some species. Once a tree was felled, the next had to be several meters away. The community guards count the number of bags of charcoal that leave the area and so a culture of sustainable resource management was borne.

Rock paths in Chimanimani lead to several well-preserved bushman paintings: images preserved that tell of resources that have been lost, buffalo, elephants, kudu, lion.

Ford Foundation also paid for the road into the Chimanmani nature reserve, a rugged and rocky climb, only for powerful 4x4’s and assisted with the rehabilitation of dirt roads through the forest.

It was then that my organization got involved. The Acacia programme for Southern Africa, a programme initiative for information and communication technologies was able to fund, through the World Conservation Union, (IUCN) high frequency radio’s with base stations in the Forestry Department’s headquarters in Chimoio and base stations at the Maribane Forest outpost, radio’s for two of the vehicles all of which enable the community guards to alert the forestry guards, who then can communicate via radio to the base to alert of any poaching and illegal logging.

José Mandevo, head of statistics at the Department of Forestry and Wildlife shows record of reducing numbers of bags of charcoal leaving the area. Only 807 bags left the area in the last year. Rungo also reports that the number of buck and elephants in the area are on the increase. Training community members included taking them to the Tchuma Tchato reserve in Tete Province, where wildlife is in abundance, and the community guard’s have set to work to protect the resources of Chimanimani to ensure they too will one day be able to attract income from hunting, rather than loose their wealth to poachers.

These very forests were Renamo domain during the many years of war. Now Alfonso Dlacama is “a respectable gentleman” and member of Parliament in Maputo. But these hills are where his troop of “bandits”. My guide is Field Manager for the Chimanimani area Garicai Penigunguza, whose passion for his job is expressed in the long hours he puts in and the vast distances he cruises in the powerful 4x4. There is great respect for this humble “chief” from the people of the area as we move through villages and settlements, into base camps where men on minimum wages watch the forest and mountain reserves and man the radio’s around the clock.

Up in the mountainous reserve under the towering 1800ft Mount Binga we scramble down rock paths to see the hidden treasure of bushmen paintings on overhangs: painting of thin men with lively erections, and fat women, buck, elephants, crocodile, and down by the river, he tells me, even fish. News of the abundance of the area that once was, and might have been preserved for several generations, until the great war. Now he says you need to be on foot to see buffalo, kudu and lion in the Mopani and Acacia forests around the mountains. No lazy giraffe because these fell prey easily to war and the poachers.

Garicai’s face stiffens, when, in a moment of exchange of stories, he tells how his father was captured by Renamo and forced to become a soldier. His mother, under great suspicion because of her husband’s “defection” was taken to jail. At 16 he and his younger sister were left alone and he got drafted by the ruling Frelimo. He was always harrowed by the fear that he would have to face his father in civil war one day.

His father died in Gaza Province. His mother is still alive. We drive back after night fall and reminisce that the backpack radio’s that the IDRC has funded and provided for the the foresters to carry, were probably the same used by Renamo and Unita in their bush wars. Our peace-time radio’s to preserve their resources, not to destroy.

I leave the area courtesy of a forestry driver, my companion for the monitoring trip Abel Otacala of the World Conservation Union in Mozambique and I thumbing to the beat of a Brazilian salsa tune being played on the local FM97.4 community radio. Gesom, the local station funded by Unesco, rocks the community with a fusion of local Manican music and international pop, and a great deal of phone-in chatter. Globalisation is butting into Chimoio’s airwaves.

Heloise Emdon is the Senior Programme Officer of the Acacia Programme for Southern Africa of the International Development Research Centre, IDRC, Canada.

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