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.

What has been the recent performance of the agricultural sector in Mozambique and the progress made thus far toward achieving the objectives established under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) initiative for Mozambique that began in late-2011?

Mozambique is a low income country, with almost 70 percent of the population living in rural areas. Farmers suffer from lack of access to technology and qualified technical services. The country is also extremely vulnerable to increasingly prevalent natural phenomena, such as cyclones Dineo, Idai and Kenneth, which destroyed crops and agricultural infrastructure between 2017 and 2019. The country faces challenges in implementing regulatory instruments for the integration of practices climate change adaptation (CCA) in the agricultural sector. The Government of Mozambique, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) have joined efforts to increase the capacity of Mozambique's agricultural and pastoral sectors to deal with climate change.The project generated relevant results, including the incorporation of specific actions for CCA in strategic plans at ministerial level and in Economic and Social Plans and District Budgets (PESOD); the preparation of Mozambique's nationally determined contribution (NDC); the creation of local and community plans to adapt to climate change; the installation of 11 agrometeorological stations and greater financial autonomy for beneficiary women.The evaluation recommended that FAO support the government to ensure the integration of CCA into key policy documents and the integration of the Farmer Field Schools (FFS) into future rural development programmes, including the new Sustenta Programme, and that, in future programmes, FAO will focus on developing value chains and promoting farmers' access to markets.

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.

The Innovation for Agribusiness (InovAgro) project, which launched with its first three year phase in 2010, uses a market system development (MSD) approach towards the goal of increasing incomes of men and women small-scale farmers in northern Mozambique. InovAgro interventions promote improved agricultural productivity, participation in selected high-potential value chains and the development of inclusive and sustainable market systems, such that impacts are expected to last long beyond the termination of the project. This paper presents results from a midline quantitative impact evaluation of the second phase of the InovAgro project interventions (2014-2017). In it, we use a carefully designed and executed quasi-experimental study design to credibly attribute changes in market engagement and welfare of participating farmers to exposure to the InovAgro II project, identifying and testing in what respects the intervention was most successful, and what regard it had less impact. Although InovAgro II projects operate in 11 districts of Zambézia and Cabo Delgado provinces, this impact evaluation focuses on two districts in Zambézia province (Alto Molócue and Molumbo), and in terms of value chains, focuses on the soybean and pigeon pea high-potential value chains, while the InovAgro II project interventions focus on these in addition to maize, sesame and groundnut. A baseline survey was undertaken in 2015 covering the 2014/2015 agricultural season and a midline follow-up survey was conducted in 2017, covering the 2016/2017 agricultural season and reaching 1,749 households of the original 1,886 households interviewed in the baseline survey. Using difference-in-difference estimation and propensity score matching, we find that exposure to the InovAgro II project is associated with an increase in the proportion of households selling soybean and pigeon pea by approximately 5% and 16%, respectively (significant at the .01 level). Exposure to the InovAgro II project also results in significantly higher shares of smallholder farmers using improved seed for soybean and pigeon pea (an increase of 6% for soybean and 2% for pigeon pea). We find that the InovAgro II project is also associated with significant increases in access to agricultural output market information from formal sources (5%) and hired labor for farming activities (8%). Despite the significant impacts on short term outcome variables, exposure to the InovAgro II project had limited impact on long term outcome variables, such as on rural-urban migration as well as engagement in the non-farm sector (two proxies for assessing potential welfare implications of the project) however this finding is not surprising given the impact evaluation covers only two years-a short period of time to bring about the long-term impacts expected to eventually emanate from an MSD project.