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Wendy Wolford, "The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique" (U California Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Wendy Wolford about her book titled the Plantation Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique, published by the University of California Press in 2025. This book really helps us understand a really key part of Mozambique. Right. Plantations might sound like, oh, we're only talking about economic history. It's like, well, yes, that is part of what we're talking about. But as I think our discussion will show, examining the plantation, both the idea and the reality, is a really important lens on examining what's happening in Mozambique now, how we got here, what this has to do with histories of colonization. It really brings together a whole bunch of things to make sense of economic history, but a lot more than that. So clearly we have a bunch of things for us to discuss. Wendy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Wendy Wolford
Miranda, thank you very much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by telling us a little bit about you and why you decided to write this book? I mean, what is this plantation ideal and why did you decide to investigate it?
- [01:16]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
Absolutely. So I am a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and have been here for about 15 years. I have a PhD in geography, and for two 20 years or so, I've mostly worked in Brazil. I have done a lot of research on land politics, distribution, state formation. Brazil is fascinating from the perspective of land ownership, inequality and the way that has shaped everything from the colonial period to markets to governance, to the way people live on, of course, and use the land. In maybe it was early 2000 and tens, I started to notice more and more people from Brazil talking about Africa, often writ large. Lula da Silva, the president at the time, was talking about Brazil becoming more active in Africa, embracing, quote, unquote, our African brothers and sisters. He had a number of reasons for thinking that Brazil should be involved in Africa. He was really gunning for a seat on the Security Council. It was about a geopolitical influence move. But there was a lot of talk of what could Brazil bring to Africa. And for Lula and others, it was an agricultural model that Brazil felt it had pioneered and made famous. You know, it was the largest growing agricultural area in the world with the sort of center west of Brazil that had become fields of gold planted to Soy in the 1970s and 80s. So there were all of these people, from Lula himself to then foreign ministry officials, and then increasingly research scientists, farmers Themselves who were going to Africa. And I was particularly interested in the way that they were going to Mozambique. Because there was a lot of talk of recreating future Brazils in Mozambique. This was kind of the. Not maybe final frontier, but it was a frontier that people felt very comfortable colonizing in the name of a kind of south south exchange of ideas. That was really south south only in name. It was a very well developed agricultural powerhouse that was looking for more land, looking for more resources, in order to extend its economic, political, and, you know, scientific influence. That doesn't really help us to understand why the notion of the plantation ideal became so important to the way that I understood how the Brazilians situated themselves in Mozambique. I really went to go look at this big project that was like the charismatic megafauna of development projects in this time period. It gets started in 2010, it really gets going by 2012, 2013. This was a project called Pro Savannah. And it was meant to recreate what had happened in Brazil in the center west, in the 1970s, in this long corridor of Mozambique. It's really interesting to me because the work that I did is a case study in the sense that it's firmly grounded in the history and experience of Mozambique. But this notion that plantations are an ideal form of agricultural production, of development, of civilizing frontiers, of organizing your entire agricultural or rural urban sector. Because so much of what's produced on large scale plantation type properties feeds into industry. So it feeds into it in terms of both large scale commodity production, corn, soy, et cetera, that goes into vertically integrated industries. But it's also about producing fuel and other resources that would feed industry. This kind of plantation ideal, or the sense that an economy or even an entire country can be somehow propped up or brought into what's considered modernity or even the 21st century. There's lots of hype or modernistic talk about the role that plantations can play. This has happened in many different places over many different time periods. So it would be true of the US south at a certain time period. Of course, of Brazil, Indonesia. People have written about this in different places. I think that there's enough history, enough empirical record of this notion of what plantations can do, that we can talk about it productively at a broader level, that we can think about it in terms of both the general nature of plantations, what those sort of look like, maybe universally how we would define a plantation, but then also what their characteristics look like in any given place or time.
- [07:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So can we, I suppose, define then what that ideal would be a little Bit of, kind of how do you know where. If you're in different places or times, kind of what are. How do you know what you're looking at is a plantation?
- [07:18]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
Oh, such a good question. Because in different places they take on such different characteristics. And with any of our concepts in the academy or beyond, but we're just talking about the academy right now. With any of our concepts, there's that danger of wanting to think about the general applicability and to zoom out from a specific case, but to do so in a way that the concept doesn't lose all of its relevance. Right. But has enough flexibility that it doesn't break apart anytime you try to apply it. So Michael Bervoy is sort of, if not famous, he's well known for saying that you can really only make theory at the meso level, not at the macro and not at the micro, but at this sort of 10,000ft up. Maybe you can sort of start to say something analytically coherent, but much broader than that. If you try to say plantations are everywhere, they always have done X, Y or Z, you're going to quickly come up with all of your black swans. If you try to say, well, we can't say anything about the connections between plantations in northeastern Brazil, in Indonesian palm, in the US south and Mozambique, then I feel like you've lost some of the productive capacity of a concept of the sort of work that academics do. I think the definition of a plantation that I find the most compelling and seems to suit the largest number of cases would be a large scale, input intensive, modernist project that is geared towards producing commodity crops for a global market, or at least for extractive purposes, where the global market may not be the target, but it is a market that is not local to the point of production. The interesting thing about much of Africa, and in particular Mozambique, and I am, of course, you know, really only familiar enough with Mozambique to be able to talk about it. But just from the secondary literature, this applies in many other places, including
- [09:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
many
- [09:49]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
places in the United States. You have not just the large scale plantations that we might imagine. You know, one extensive property where everything is planted to one crop kind of thing, or two crops, depending on the season. That's one model for a plantation that does apply in many places, but another one in Mozambique, which is particular to the history of colonization is something that looks much more like contract farming or outgrower arrangements of different kinds. And that's where really, Beginning in the 1930s, the Portuguese colonial rulers in Mozambique were having trouble extracting enough out of the local laborers or people working on the land, they really wanted to wring more out of these individuals. And so they said it isn't always possible to have them dislocate and work directly on plantations. But if they could keep a little bit of land and then provide a tribute. So they're essentially farming enough in the cotton crop that we desire, or tobacco or coconuts, and then they're bringing all or a portion of that into the regional office, into the processing unit. And that pays their tax or their tithe. And we can leave them to take care of their own reproduction. Because that's actually quite a hassle. So that kind of dispersed, but aggregated at the point of kind of processing facility. Is also a plantation in everything but property title. So I would consider that to be very much a part of the aggregated form of production. That you see throughout the colonial period in Mozambique. And you very much see as part of the government's plans for agricultural development today.
- [12:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really helpful to understand kind of what the ideal looks like in general, as well as kind of where it gets embedded in Mozambique. Right. This is not a story where the plantation comes to Mozambique because of the Brazilians with Lula recently. Like, as you said, it goes back much further into the colonial period. And it's not just because of economic reasons. Right. That the Portuguese are implementing this in Mozambique. Besides the kind of. It makes it easier to export things. Why else? What other colonial goals did this plantation focused system serve?
- [12:36]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
Portugal is a really interesting colonial power. It is regularly referred to in the archives and in sort of a discourse at that time as the sick man of Europe. Or really the poorest of the colonizing countries at the time. It's a small country, of course, it distinguishes itself in navigation. It is put onto the map as a colonial power, not just because of navigation, but, of course, because of Brazil. So Brazil is this huge, very rich territory. That really sets Portuguese Portugal up for desiring and then sustaining this very wide network of essentially trading outposts or colonial outposts, and then Brazil. So navigators travel, they place the. The stone marker for the Portuguese. And for a long time, the Portuguese sort of claimed access to and even control over this wide flung network. Without actually doing a lot of the work to maintain or even develop their own presence in these different places. It isn't until the late 1800s, so. So Brazil, of course, gets its independence in the early 1800s. That is a real shock to Portugal. It happens in the context of major upheavals. You have Napoleon stomping around, the Portuguese crown flees. They take up residence in Brazil when they leave. The sun of the king at the time stays Pedro ii. And Pedro, he says, brazil is now independent and I'm ruling it. It's quite a shock because that's a huge source of revenue for the Portuguese. So for a long time there are discussions about where and how to either develop other colonies. Can they find new Brazils in Africa? There are efforts made, particularly in Angola. The slave trade is quite rich for the Portuguese. The conversation and really the. The application of development tools, you know, of real territorial management doesn't really take hold in Africa for the Portuguese until the late 1800s. And it's a sort of push from the international community. The Berlin Congo Conference of 1884, 85, where really the British are dominant. And they and others say in order for you to say you actually have a colony in Africa, you need to be able to prove that you can control the territory. You need to say that you're doing it for the good of the world and you need to make the trade and etc. To some extent open to other nations. So that's really the impetus for Portugal to say, okay, we have to do more in southern Africa at that time. What is today Angola and today Mozambique are their largest possessions in southern Africa. And they now are tasked with having to develop their territorial control. This represents a pretty significant problem because if you look on a map, Portugal is very tiny. Again, it was a very relatively impoverished colonial power. They don't have the resources, they don't have the capital, they don't have the human power to do a lot of the development work that they're supposed to in Africa. So from the beginning, the Portuguese see external capital in the form of investment essentially in plantations as the key to making these overseas territories really flourish. The way that they're going to get both territorial control but also resources back to the motherland is by leasing out large properties within southern Africa to individuals, preferably Portuguese, but if not Portuguese, at least they have to have a Portuguese flag flying somewhere on their property. Those individuals will then do the work of developing the land and sending either raw materials or resources back to Portugal. So the early records from, you know, the late 1800s, the early 1900s, some of these records are by individuals who are sponsored by the Portuguese. Some are travelers who are there to see how Portugal's territories differ from, you know, Rhodesia, from Natal. The records all basically say, listen, if you can get large scale commodity crop production going in this otherwise quite forsaken land, then you'll have a true, you know, bountiful contributor to Portugal's wealth. And so my book really goes back all the way to the early 1900s, even though I'm not a historian and I didn't intend to do an intensely sort of historical or archive based research project. But when I started to look at pro savannah and really thought about why pro savannah comes to be so powerful, how does it take root so quickly in political imaginaries, I had to go back to the early 1900s to see that this had been part of the rhetoric, part of the governing approach in Portugal and in this territory of Mozambique for at least 100 years, at least the early 1900s. And there had been intentional plans to develop exactly these kind of large scale plantations through capital from outside, through colonists, either from Portugal or from neighboring countries. And with the help of the Portuguese, mostly in the role of getting the local laborers, the natives, to work the land. That's where they really felt they excelled.
- [19:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So that's really important context, right, as you've described, to explain kind of why this was such a thing that Portugal was trying to make happen and indeed did make happen in Mozambique. But of course, by the time you're coming to look at this, Mozambique's been independent for a while, right? Mozambique becomes independent in the 70s. So does the plantation ideal go away and then come back when Brazil gets interested, or what happens to the plantation ideal after independence?
- [20:09]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
The interesting thing about plantations to me is that they don't have any solidarity or natural affinity with colonialism versus capitalism versus socialism, or, you know, they, they. You find them as fairly hegemonic across many different economic and even political systems. So Mozambique gets its independence in 1975. And that was a really interesting aspect of doing research in Mozambique, because I'd worked for so long in Brazil, where colonization was an important part of the history. Nobody was still alive from that time. And Brazil had always had so much independence from Portugal and very quickly developed its own internal market, internal politics. So I wasn't really used to thinking about the Portuguese aspect of Brazil as something living. You know, the, the Portuguese are the butt of many jokes in Brazil, for better or for worse. It's sort of, that's often the, the punchline in Mozambique, colonization was so recent. And so you're talking to somebody who is telling you a story about being put into jail because they wore shoes. And that wasn't allowed. If you weren't civilized, which meant European, you weren't supposed to be mimicking civilized ways. And so you oughtn't be wearing shoes. And that could actually be given if there was a particularly vindictive local official, that could be grounds for imprisonment. I don't think that happened very often. The. The records aren't necessarily all that clear on that kind of thing. I don't think that happened that often. I read a couple of cases where people had been in prison and then talked to this individual. But you realize, or I realized when I was interviewing him that he was talking about himself, like he had personal history and memory of Mozambique under colonial rule. It very much shapes relationships today because the Portuguese had a way of ruling that utilized local leaders or also members of communities who would be conscripted really, into surveying and disciplining or punishing their own local residents, their own community members. So you might now be farming right next to somebody who, under the colonial period, their family or even that particular individual had been involved in holding prisoners who had somehow tried to defy or escape the Portuguese colonial rule. So it really creates a very particular set of connections between people. There is often not as much trust or thick ties, you know, that you might have found if they hadn't been pitted against each other in the way that they were under colonial rule. You asked me a question that I don't think I've answered. Do you mind repeating?
- [23:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, no, I think that that does go a long way to answering the question, which was about why the plantation ideal persisted even after independence. Right. Is that this idea, like this whole kind of before and after independence thing isn't sort of as far back in time as we might think. And so, you know, just because there's a moment of independ doesn't mean that, like, all the ideas magically go away. Right. Are there other factors we should consider?
- [24:12]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
It's such a good question. And it's kind of heartbreaking because you have this incredible army that manages to come together even under probably the most brutal colonial regime in Africa, the Portuguese, and really one of the longest lasting colonial powers in the region. So, you know, so independence was something incredible. It was the organization and bravery of a small number of individuals. And then. And then it was also the global context. Right. The global opinion and other factors were really working against the Portuguese maintaining their. Their power in. In Mozambique. But you kind of have to imagine that the Portuguese leave in 1975, and they're given an ultimatum by the rulers who take over after them. And the Portuguese who are in Mozambique, many of whom did not want to leave, you know, they thought of Mozambique as an extension of Portugal that's what they were told by Antonio Salazar, the dictator who really deepened colonial rule in Mozambique from 1930 or he takes over in the early 1930s until the late 1960s. The people who went to live in Mozambique felt like they were given assurance from the Portuguese that they would be able to consider this their land. And independence is a rude shock. People are given 24 hours, they can take about 20 kilos of possessions with them. Everything else they leave behind. So the way that knowledge works is that it accretes slowly over time. It manifests in textbooks, in infrastructure, in the laws that are laid down that govern the relationship between people in the land. And when the Portuguese leave in 1975, they burn crops, they let animals loose to wander in the countryside, they take fences down. But even still, all of the infrastructure is organized around, particularly in the south, the large scale productive farms. And so it's very hard for the Mozambican rulers to say, okay, we're going to redo this entirely. Let's, let's imagine a blank slate and think about what the people want and reorganize as if colonization didn't happen and they're not given a whole lot of breathing room. This is sort of passing over a lot of history, but it's a difficult political moment for black independent socialist leaning set of rulers who are just on the border with South Africa. South Africa is very nervous about this new independence. And so they also get involved, fomenting resistance to the chosen political leaders at that time, led by Samora Machel. The ensuing civil war means that there's even less room to imagine alternatives. What the political elites in power at the time have to do is build on the infrastructure that in a sense they've inherited. I don't know if things had been different, if they would have really imagined something different. Because if you think about socialism or communism in different places, the idea of aggregating people, the idea of economies of scale, of modernized large scale plantation production is very firmly entrenched. So would that really have looked different even with a kind of African socialism or an African Marxism that you see with a lot of Maoism in it that you see in Africa at independence and particularly in Mozambique? I don't know. But the history is that a lot of the more successful large scale farms get taken over as state farms and run as collectives in order to maximize production, feed people, etc, the money that comes into Mozambique at that time, a lot of it is aid, it's funded by the Scandinavian countries. And really the feeling is, yeah, we've got to prop up, deepen, important, improve these essentially, you know, large scale plantation farms in order to get Mozambique up and running. And that discourse of Mozambique needs development fast. It needs a way to extract resources, profits, capital from the land, from the people, as quickly as possible in order to develop. Right. So the people and the land become a means to an end rather than the focus themselves. Right. It's a way of saying, you see this a lot in documents from USAID and others. We recognize that people don't have access to sufficient education, to health resources, to market opportunities, etc. But it would take a long time to provide those resources, build up that infrastructure, create a different style of more inclusive, inward looking development. And Mozambique doesn't have that time. So what we need to do is build on what it already has and that in this case is large scale extraction. Then Mozambique will have all this money and presumably because we believe that there's a democracy, that money will get reinvested into that kind of development infrastructure. That's part of the plantation ideal, is that you'll extract resources fast and then you can think about how to put them back into the local communities. The problem is, is that there's like this valley of death between the ideas and actual realization of sustained long term community development.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this is exactly where I wanted us to go.
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Dr. Wendy Wolford
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This all sounds great on pieces of policy documents, but what does this actually mean for the farmers?
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Dr. Wendy Wolford
Yeah, that's the key question. Right. What is it like to live squarely in the sites of plantations and then because Mozambique has plantations, but really for the most part they don't thrive. You're also asking what is it like to live in the shadow of plantations? Right. What is it like to live constantly on the margins of the political and economic elite who are imagining very different futures than what you yourself might be able to imagine or, or contribute to, at least at the moment. You know, I'm not saying people wouldn't be able to fit into these schemes, but they're rarely designed in a way that is bottom up or really thinking about the people who would be working the land as the primary beneficiaries. That's not how plantation works, works. Plantations work. They're sort of by definition extractive. So life then living on the land, you know, probably 70 to 75, 80% of Mozambicans live in the countryside and maybe 90% of those are considered by the World bank to be highly vulnerable. They have a sort of multidimensional poverty indicator and they might have access to a piece of land. But they don't have school or, you know, health services or running water, that kind of thing. The rural areas in Mozambique are extremely precarious. The urban capital of Maputo, and then a few other urban areas. Have a lot of the amenities that you might imagine in any large city. But the countryside has not really been able to benefit from that configuration or those resources. So the livelihoods working on the land Continue to be quite precarious. People are working small plots of land. So the average size is between 1 and 5 hectares of land. They're working primarily with hand tools. They're living in communities that are often quite diverse, Temporary and migratory. So one of the main forms of production on the land has been swidden agriculture. They're not necessarily pastoralists, but they will move from place to place for a number of reasons. One of that is tradition. Another one is fear of either political capture. Sometimes, quite literally political capture, Particularly during the height of the civil war. Less literally is the fear of being brought into one or another village scheme or villageization scheme. So people will move quite frequently. And that means that the communities that they're in. Are often not ones that have been sustained by custom or tradition or even familiarity. There are often kinship networks, but even that has been disrupted by movement, by politics, by necessity. People moving to places where they might have a better option. So in the book, I talk in a few chapters, but really in chapter four and chapter five. About what it's like to be living on the land in the rural areas. And one of the chapters particularly follows what the labor regulations were under the Mozambique and uses the production and then marketing of manioc, also known as cassava. It's a tuber. It is the most common foodstuff in Mozambique at present. And I use that as sort of a way of thinking about how local farmers have been treated in Mozambique. Because manioc is largely disdained. It's considered, you know, a native food. It's feckless. It doesn't grow right. It's so easy to grow that you can grow without having any real skill at farming, which is how the Portuguese saw the local residents in Mozambique. It's an interesting way to think about how the Portuguese and then the independent Mozambican rulers, In a sense, ignore the capacity of local residents to really farm. You know, they can produce these European crops If given the right instruction. But they're not seen as farmers or land managers in their own right. And that has a whole host of implications for things like research, science, and other plans for rural communities. In Mozambique, Yeah.
- [37:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think this idea of sort of research science is where I'd like us to go next, because you do talk about that in the book. So is that sort of just the same kind of idea of what we've been discussing of sort of lots of things that sound nice on paper but kind of miss what's happening in reality?
- [37:27]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
Maybe that's one way of thinking of it. But really the interesting thing to me about the research is how, for a whole host of reasons, local but also global, the research that is done in agriculture in Mozambique is so focused on what I would call plantation economies or plantation crops, that it leaves out the vast majority of farmers or rural inhabitants or economies, you know, communities in Mozambique. And you can kind of see how it happens, not just here, but in other places. And. And, you know, for some of my next work, I really want to think about how research science at an international level maybe has some of these characteristics in many different places where it's applied. So thinking about where the scientists do their work, but also where those scientists are educated, and this kind of separation from the science and the people living on the ground is only increasing, I would argue, with the application of new technologies like AI. If you think about nanotechnologies in plants that speak to GIS systems, in tractors, there's a very small minority of farmers in the world who are going to be able to benefit. But a lot of our research dollars are going in that direction. So just thinking about the characteristics of research in Mozambique specifically, and why I refer to a kind of plantation science, it has a lot to do with the fact that from the beginning in the early 1900s, when you have scientists exploring Mozambique and you have people, Portuguese officials, thinking about what kind of research is needed, it is very much funded externally and geared towards possible production or commodities for an external market. So today I actually don't know on this specific day, but as of a year ago in Mozambique, all of the research that the research scientists who are, you know, housed in the Ministry of Agriculture, in this Institute for Agronomy research of Mozambique, and all of the other international scientists who are on site, all of the research projects that those scientists engage in are funded by external dollars. So Mozambique, the Ministry of Agriculture convey for the salaries of the research scientists who are employed by the Ministry, but can't pay for any research. So in order to get a project funded, the local researchers need to appeal to international agencies. They need to show that their results will be usable at scale. So scale becomes sort of the Holy Grail of development. Of research efforts in Mozambique because, and more broadly, because any given funding agency, whether it's Gates or it is the international fertilizer company, they need to be able to say, we funded something and it took place in these three different countries. So it's, it's not just going to work in a small, you know, community in rural Mozambique. It's going to be effective in Nigeria, in Bangladesh and in Mozambique. And therefore, once those results are in, that deliverable can scale up globally. Right? So there's this idea that you want your research to be relevant to these external audiences in order to capture funding. These research scientists then work basically in the interest of, and according to the dictates for these funders. So deliverables run on a particular cycle. The grants often will include, or the research projects will include funding for a quote, unquote, emerging farmer to pilot the new variety or the new technology. Maybe they get a couple of harvests with it and then they're supposed to then try to be the front edge, the leading edge of this new technology. There isn't money in any of the research grants that I talk to research scientists about to actually oversee adoption and then utilization of that new technology. So it kind of stops at the, at the science end of things. And the research scientists are very aware of this problem, but there really isn't either incentive or resources to be able to do it differently. And so the scientists would say things to me like, that's not our job to make sure that the things that we're producing actually get onto the fields or into farmers hands. We're not politicians, NGOs, we're scientists. And the work of the scientist is to come up with a new scientific advance that will, you know, be scientifically interesting. They're all good scientists and they're good people. The issue is the way that that research is situated in terms of funding and in terms of building on a body of scientific knowledge that values certain kinds of deliverables. So I will say that in the research institutes that I was part of in Mozambique, the plant breeder is really dominant. The idea of being able to produce a new variety that you can sort of show, you can say, here are the characteristics, this is why it could really be beneficial. That was considered good science, but doing work that would help farmers, real farmers in Mozambique, to work their land better, you know, new land management techniques or much more modest ideas about maybe agroecology or different ideas of intercropping. Would it be better to plant corn with beans in these configurations that could do A whole lot for hunger. It could do a lot for the quality of the soil. But it wouldn't necessarily either travel easily or be the kind of result that a funding agency, a scientific funding agency, would be very excited about. So for a bunch of reasons, you have a kind of scientific framework that lends itself to a plantation ideal.
- [45:28]
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- [45:57]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
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- [46:01]
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Dr. Wendy Wolford
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- [46:29]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
Yeah.
- [46:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And there's a bunch of kind of things in there that I think set us up to go right back to where we started of like what's this pro savannah idea? Right, right. Like you've given us all this context that I think many listeners can kind of guess at this point, sort of who is interested in it, what are the sort of incentives? And then probably some inklings as well of like why it didn't work as planned. So do you want to take us through that briefly?
- [46:53]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
Is a fascinating project and fascinating both for how it comes about and then how it falls apart. And it really is in the context of the sort of late 2000s, early 2000s, when we've just had a world food crisis, 2006, 2007. We have an economic, global collapse of insurance markets, housing. You see it in the US but it reverberates. It is a moment when people are worried about the potential instability of food prices, but also the, the idea that you might have whole countries not be able to feed their population because for so many years countries had said, okay, we might not be able to produce Saudi Arabia, for example, on our own land, but we're very comfortable importing Food, we have food for oil, this kind of thing. Well, when you have the almost overnight doubling, tripling, quadrupling of key commodity prices, then you start to have riots in the streets. You have a questioning of political legitimacy, a coup. In Madagascar, you have all of these major actors, from investors to national governments saying, wait a second, we might need to be more directly involved in food production. And it doesn't necessarily mean that all of a sudden Saudi Arabia can start planting massive amounts of food on their land. But what they can do is take sovereign wealth funds and invest them into production directly in Ethiopia and other countries, where they might then be able to more directly have the produce from that production feedback into national food stores. So around the mid-2000s, you see the rise in a number of what are called by the World bank, large scale land acquisitions. Lsla, it's a nice euphemistic term for what the activists refer to as global land grabs. A group of researchers in southern Africa referred to this as the second scramble for Africa, because a lot of the new investment goes into sub Saharan Africa, where even the World bank is like, listen, the land in sub Saharan Africa is not producing what it could if put to modern techniques, if invested with appropriate amount of capital, and if it had access to global markets, essentially. In short, the idea was if you were able to get investors who could promote essentially plantation production, then the land would be most effectively used. Produced Pro Savannah is started in this exact context. So, yes, you have Lula saying, I'd like some international visibility. You have the Japanese who had collaborated with Brazil in the 1970s in order to develop the center west region of Brazil, what's referred to as the cehado, in large scale soy plantations, soy, cotton and to some extent corn. In the 1970s, that they had worked with the United States and that was seen by pretty much all actors involved in that effort as a huge success. So Brazil says, we want to be more engaged in Africa. Our forte, our sort of economic miracle, is the Sahadu. It is our agricultural expertise. Mbrappa, which is the research agency in Brazil that led a lot of the work in the Sahadu, is the sort of darling of the development world. They're considered to be forward looking, innovative, excellent research, and they are. So Brazil says, we have Embra, we have this experience, were basically, you know, sisters and brothers to people in former Portuguese colonies. They get together with the Japanese who say, that was such a successful program, why don't we see if we can do something again? And they look around Africa, they aren't necessarily set on Mozambique, but Mozambique offers the right conditions. And basically the conditions are relative, as Japan and Brazil see it. Lack of agricultural sort of modernization, which is true. A lot of large scale farming, sorry, a lot of small scale farming without advanced techniques. And Mozambique also has the willingness to provide its land and its people as inputs into this kind of project to remake the agricultural area into the image of the Brazilian Cehadoum. So Brazil, Japan and Mozambique come together and in the wake of these fears about food production, they sign this agreement to create Pro Savannah. And the idea is that the Brazilians will bring their science. Japan helped to deepen. They put money into deepening the port at Beira, which would be then the deepest or the second deepest port on the eastern coast of Africa. So that you could take whatever was produced through Pro Savannah, get it to the port, and then ship it really east to Asia. And then Japan also had the role of coming in to support community development projects. That was going to be their remit. And then the Mozambicans would provide the land and the labor for this project. It's really interesting to me how in the sort of context of let's call it the global land grab, the two big things you see are these kind of research, production, collaborations, and at the same time a huge push to title land. So the idea is that a silver bullet to allowing countries to find the land for large scale land acquisitions, but also to ensure that smallholders are protected. The thing that's going to make all of this work out well is land titles. So at the same time, you have large scale research and development projects and also land titling. And they work together because land titling will open up land for investment. It is a way to give security to the community or the holder of a particular plot. And it's also a way to make large swaths of land visible and open for investment. There's a huge debate as to the role and effect of land titling that I won't go into right now. But Pro Savannah seems really logical in the context of the global land grab. And because of the larger financial crisis at the time, many investors are looking for markets to place their money. Where you kind of can't lose, right? You thought you couldn't lose with insurance. You thought you couldn't lose with the automobile industry or housing. It turns out that those all tank in the late 2000s. And so you have pension funds, other investors looking for double digit returns on land. And the whole idea is land is finite, you're always going to need it you can't make more of it really. I mean, depends on how you call, how you define making it. But we do have a pretty set territorial remit on this planet at least. So the idea was you could get stability, access to these resources, but also a good investment if you invested in land. So along with Pro Savannah, they created a greenfield financing fund that they hoped would get up to about $2 billion in order to start building the infrastructure for investors and farmers to come into this region and begin really planting and harvesting large scale soy plantations. So the idea for this area was soy. A whole bunch of things go wrong. And you know, when I first went to Mozambique in 2013, this project, there was so much hype about it, it was so fantastical, it was going to be so productive. And it attracted a whole bunch of us to see what was going on by 2014. 15, there were clear problems. The, you know, researchers weren't getting this sort of access to previous scientific information or infrastructure that they had hoped. The farmers went from Brazil to Mozambique to check out the possibility of investing in land and moving to Mozambique. And they by all accounts were appalled to see how populated this region of Mozambique already was. So they were used to thinking about the Sadhu in Brazil, which was a pretty lightly populated region, when the large farmers moved from the south into that region to begin planting. But Mozambique, the place where the government wanted these new plantations to go, that was one of the most densely populated areas of the country. It's just that the Mozambique government, much like the Portuguese colonists, thought, don't worry, will control the local population. They're not really using the land. There will be lots available for large scale and modern farmers. But the Brazilians for the most part went back home. They didn't stay, they didn't take up farming on this, on this frontier. So for a bunch of reasons, you had Pro Savannah really packing up by 2016, 2017, when I went to Mozambique for my longer research trip, funded by Fulbright and by the nsf. So then the project that I took up really became why does it fail? And also why did people think it was a good idea in the first place, given that once you see it fail, it sort of seems like, well, yeah, it was going to fail. It was almost over determined. Right? So I think you can say this about a lot of projects, big development projects that we know about in the literature that then are overtaken by local ecologies, local interests, that kind of thing. But fundamentally the issue here was that sort of, yet again, the designers of this program didn't Take into account what people on the ground actually wanted or needed.
- [59:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yep, I think that definitely makes a lot of sense and takes us right back to where we started this interview with, which is kind of your initial sort of listening to the Lula things of going, well, hang on a second, what is going on? Right. And starting with that question, there's lots of like, this does seem strange, but as you've taken us through the interview, as you've taken us through the book. Right. We have, I think gotten to a place where, yep, that outcome isn't a massive shock. Now that we know all of this,
- [59:58]
Dr. Wendy Wolford
it's really important to me to talk about the last chapter in the book, which I co wrote with a scholar, Natasha Bruno, who has been working in rural development in Mozambique for a decade more. She has a PhD from the Netherlands and she was a researcher in, and then the head of the Rural Organization of Mozambique, the omr, which is a fantastic, really good critical research institute on rural questions. So the two of us talk to a number of people in Mozambique, activists, scholars, some academics, some people who are working in non governmental organizations to just say, what should Mozambique have? Like what, what options can you imagine? Whether it's plantations. So we didn't say no plantations, we just said, what do you think Mozambique needs for its future to do well. Right. And what's interesting to me is that the responses we got back seem so obvious and so, I don't know, unspectacular. You know, we need democracy. We need people to be informed and participating and to have their ideas and interests matter. We need to be the end point of development, not a means to an end. We need to take advantage of local knowledge in farming as opposed to having that stamped out and treated as a hindrance. The desire for internal markets, that work is so huge. And the thing that's interesting to me is that a project like Pro Savannah, which when you read the documents, when you think about it, it's crazy, right? Like it's just, it's looking out on this landscape of rural poverty and saying, we have exactly what you need. You mostly work with hand tools. And we envision a landscape that is buzzing with tractors and large scale commodity production for Asia, with people who, you know, at. In 2024, over half of Mozambique's population couldn't afford enough to eat. So on the one hand you have Pro Savannah. That is crazy. But that makes a lot of sense. It's common sense. To development officials, to the rulers of Mozambique, to the scientists, this all seems totally like the right thing. To do. These ideas that these academics and activists, these scholars told us are the ones that somehow get treated like they're crazy, right? So local democracy, participatory planning, agroecology, that's treated like stuff of the university. Pie in the sky. You're super naive if that's what you promote. I think that that is, to me, at the end of the day, the most damaging effect is a plantation ideal, that the plantation comes to be seen as the obvious ideal. And all of these other ideas, all of these other ways of organizing land, labor and society are treated like fantasies.
- [63:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for taking us through it and also giving us that hint earlier of what you'll be working on next. So while you work on that project, I'm sure it'll be very intriguing to look at influence of education on some of these topics. Listeners can read the book we've been discussing to get more details titled the Plantation Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique, published by the University of California Press in 2025. Wendy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.