The recent influx of agricultural investment to Africa is increasingly equated with land grabbing by investors from emerging and Northern economies seeking to produce commodities to serve the needs of their own food and energy markets. This paper reflects on this discourse by unpacking agricultural investments in Mozambique – one of the largest recipients of agricultural investment in Africa. By drawing on official investment data and structured interviews conducted with 69 agricultural investors in Mozambique, this paper analyzes agricultural investment trends, characteristics and the factors that shape investors’ social and environmental conduct. It illustrates that, contrary to popular depiction, regional investors, domestic food end-markets, and private finance are the primary drivers of investment. Moreover, this paper shows that investors differ significantly in the types of strategies, business models and practices they adopt. The findings highlight a lack of nuance in the global agricultural investment discourse and the need for more evidence-based policy intervention in order to adequately leverage the potential of agricultural investments to contribute to inclusive green growth.

"A powerful polemic against agricultural technology." —Nature A major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise's Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests. Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow food. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.

After the global financial crisis of 2008, a new trend in foreign direct investments (FDI) emerged: investors' rising interest in farmland in developing nations. This 'land rush' was a marker of increased land commodification and agricultural financialization, but has also been associated with global narratives of agricultural modernization, and development through FDI of 'cheap, unproductive and/or idle' farmland. Yet, as this book demonstrates, global investment dynamics are dictated by complex economic, political, socio-historical dynamics in any host country. Focusing on the land rush in Tanzania, the contexts of six investment projects in the nation are examined and unpacked, helping to understand the ways in which political struggles over land, capital and authority all feed into determining the goals - and eventually the outcomes - of the 'farmland investment game'.

This timely Handbook demonstrates that global linkages, flows and circulations merit a more central place in theorization about development. Calling for a mobilities turn, it challenges the sedentarist assumptions which still underlie much policy making and planning for the future.

The International Development Law Organization (IDLO) and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) assessed the legal frameworks that govern land-use activities and investments in Mozambique. Mozambique’s legal framework for environmental management is well developed, and recent legal reforms have strengthened key public interest safeguards. Similarly, the country has established a comprehensive framework for investment through the Investment Law and Investment Promotion Centre (CPI), and enshrined in the Land Law the right to the use and benefit of land (DUAT). The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process places public consultation at the heart of effective environmental management. It extends participation to a broad spectrum of stakeholders at an early stage, allowing, in theory, substantial influence over the design and implementation of the EIA process. The National Council for Sustainable Development (CONDES) and the Ministry for Environmental Coordination (MICOA) have not managed, however, to influence high level government policy decisions and push convincingly for a sustainable development agenda.

This study responds to some of Mozambique's basic development challenges and provides qualitative and quantitative insights for policymaking from an economywide perspective. The report highlights the importance of agricultural development showing agriculture's large sectoral multiplier effects and that applying scarce capital to agriculture is generally more effective than applying it to industry and services. A novel CGE model is developed and used in a series of analyses focused on the impact and design of economic policy. Issues addressed are aid dependency, biases in price incentives facing the agriculture sector, improvement in agricultural technology and marketing margins, risk-reducing behavior and gender roles in agricultural production, and food aid distribution. The study also provides a future perspective and analyzes the Mozambican economy using dynamic macroeconomic modeling techniques, demonstrating that sophisticated analytical tools can be of significant value, even in "data-poor" situations.

Globalization and Agriculture: Redefining Unequal Development focuses on the development of national agriculture of nine countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia from two different and complementary angles. One angle is the opportunities created by globalization for agricultural production and how the countries have dealt with the expansion of the world, as a consequence of the world market. The other angle is the social and economic consequences of globalization for agricultural and rural development. The case studies included in this book prove that the contradictory meanings referred above are indeed representative of different facets and features of globalization.