African Green Revolution, food sovereignty and constrained livelihood choice in Mozambique

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the complicated food security agendas of the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty models in Mozambique. Drawing on fieldwork conducted by the author in Mozambique in 2014 and 2015, the paper analyses how smallholder farmers engage with these two agrarian models. Whereas the literature frequently presents the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty in oppositional frames, this paper finds that farmers in Mozambique utilize some of the tools that these models offer in complementary rather than competing ways. One such area is the use of commercial hybrid seeds and herbicides by some farmers associated with food sovereignty, an approach that runs counter to food sovereignty’s principles of agroecology. In Mozambique, farmers’ “lived experience” of food sovereignty is more a strategic response to their limited livelihood options, using whatever tools are available to them, rather than a resistance to power.