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Tobacco Industry Generates Jobs in Tete 

The building of a tobacco processing factory in the central Mozambican province of Tete has already generated about 700 construction jobs, and is expected to create a further 3,500 jobs when the factory starts operating early next year, reports Thursday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias".

Mozambican Labour Minister Mario Sevene visited the undertaking this week, and stressed that the most important gain from the factory would be job creation, one of the key issues discussed during a meeting of his Ministry's Coordinating Council, that took place in Tete recently.

The factory belongs to the Mozambique Leaf Tobacco Company, and the construction work is in the hands of the South African company Grinaker.

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Country to Process Its Own Tobacco 

The Mozambican authorities say that 2004 is the last year when tobacco produced in Mozambique will be exported to Malawi for processing, since the country's own processing plant, in the western province of Tete, is to be inaugurated next year.

"Our tobacco is still going to be processed in Malawi this year, but the produce from the 2004/2005 campaign will be processed at the Tete plant, that is now under construction", according to Setina Titosse, head of the production department in the Agriculture Ministry.

Although some Mozambican tobacco is sent into Zimbabwe, most of the crop is processed in Malawi.

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Mozambique Signs Convention On Tobacco Control 

Mozambique signed on Wednesday the Convention on the Control of Tobacco, passed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in May.

A press release from the Health Ministry says that Health Minister Francisco Songane signed the document on behalf of the Mozambican government at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

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Tobacco Dispute With Malawi Definitively Solved 

Malawian Agriculture Minister Aleke Banda has promised that there will be no repetition of the obstacles imposed during the last two years on the processing of Mozambican tobacco in Malawi. Speaking to Mozambican journalists in Blantyre on Saturday, Banda said that the agreement he had signed with his Mozambican counterpart Helder Muteia in Maputo in July solved the problem definitively.

"We have good relations of cooperation with Mozambique", he said. "I was in Maputo and we signed an agreement to regulate cross-border trade, not only in tobacco, but also in other goods. But it was certainly tobacco that created most problems". Banda added it was necessary to bear in mind that both Malawi and Mozambique are tobacco producing countries who do business with international tobacco companies that act according to their own rules. The intention of both countries, he stressed, was to eliminate problems, and this would involve the establishment of national organisations of tobacco producers.

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Farmers quit Zimbabwe to be pioneers once more 

Driven off their land in Zimbabwe, scores of white farmers are trekking into neighbouring Mozambique to carve out new lives in a country recovering from years of civil war and appalling floods.

The pioneering excitement felt by the new arrivals is soon tempered by the tough conditions where everything has to be built from scratch.

Forced to spend months in tents on remote plots of land, the farmers are being struck down by more virulent strains of malaria than they are used to back home in Zimbabwe.

Unable to borrow money from banks to pay their start-up costs, the farmers mostly work as "share croppers" for large agricultural companies, signing 10-year contracts with little chance of any financial profit.

But despite the hardships the mood was upbeat at the London Pub in Chimoio, the town that forms the hub for the nascent white Zimbabwean farming community of Mozambique. . .

Down a long track and across a muddy riverbed, things were more austere on the new farm set up by Dawid Lombard, 37, and other farmers as a syndicate working for one of the big tobacco multinationals.

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And Now to the Notebook . . . Wily Mozambicans 

But while the Zimbabwean government is busy facilitating the starvation of the majority of its people by evicting commercial farmers, Chissano's countrymen have begun to eat food grown by those same rejected farmers. . .

Mozambique's Minister of Agriculture Helder Muteia says 20 farmers are working in the country and there is a "waiting list" of 50 others who have yet to fulfil conditions that will enable them to be allocated land.

Muteia expects Mozambique's first tobacco processing plant to result from Zimbabwean investment in the near future. This will free Mozambican tobacco producers from their current reliance on Malawi to process their crop. . .

At least six million Zimbabweans could starve to death and the country's top foreign currency earner, the tobacco industry, is on the verge of collapse.

The Mozambicans, on the other hand, will laugh all the way to the bank and to their larders.

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Evicted white Zimbabweans welcomed to farm in Mozambique 

White landowners who had been evicted from their farms in Zimbabwe were welcome to farm in neighboring Mozambique, the government said Sunday.

"We have a law on investment," Mozambican Foreign Minister Leonardo Simao told state television. "If someone wants to come here and invest, and respects our investment laws, he is welcome. Be he or she white, black, yellow, green — if it is possible — he is welcome."

Zimbabwe's government has ordered thousands of white farmers from their land, saying it is to be distributed to landless blacks, and a number have expressed interest in moving to neighboring countries.

The farm seizures have plunged Zimbabwean into political and economic chaos, and contributed to widespread food shortages.

Twelve Zimbabwean farmers had moved to central Mozambique over the past 18 months, and were farming corn and tobacco, said Mozambican Agriculture Minister Helder Muteia.

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Maputo probing land-grabs 

Authorities in Mozambique and Zimbabwe have launched a probe into claims by provincial authorities that Zimbabwean commercial and peasant farmers are seizing arable land along the Mozambican side of the border.

"We have had reports of illegal land occupations from the Manica provincial authorities, the most serious case of which involves a major Zimbabwean tobacco grower, " said national director of land mapping and planning José Mucombo .

Mucombo said authorities in one district of Mussorize had reported that Zimbabweans had been extending their farms across the border into the fertile lands of the central Manica province.

"There have also been persistent reports of Zimbabwean peasants violating the border in different locations..." he said. [This graph only]

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Malawi Withdraws Surtax on Mozambican Tobacco 

The Malawian government has decided that as from Wednesday, Mozambique's tobacco entering Malawi will no longer be subject to the 10 percent surtax that was suddenly imposed on April 13, the Diario de Mocambique newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The permanent secretary with the Malawian Agriculture Ministry, E.S. Malindi, was quoted as saying that Malawi acknowledges that the measure was "not healthy" and is now assessing the damage done to the Mozambican economy.

Speaking to reporters in the western Mozambican province of Tete, Malindi said that "Malawi depends on Mozambique, and it is through this country that Malawian exports and imports flow. The two governments should find mechanisms to overcome this obstacle once and for all."

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Water, tobacco, and global inequalities  

These photographs are used to illustrate the public health impact of lack of water and global inequalities... For Mozambique, one of the world's poorest countries and at the time devastated by the effects of a US and South African backed guerrilla war the impact was immense... Throughout the two years that I lived and worked in central Mozambique I saw trees collapse because of the drought and I never saw maize grow successfully. I did however see fields full of healthy growing tobacco on a multinational owned tobacco farm. Figure 4 shows tobacco drying in one of the barns of the tobacco farm. The most appalling image I have in my mind is of poor Mozambicans grappling on hands and knees in the dust and dirt trying to pick up individual kernels of corn that had fallen from the backs of aid lorries with slogans such as "Jesus Alive" on their sides. Behind them were the green fields of growing tobacco and passing them also on the track the tankers of water being imported to grow the deadly weed.

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Tobacco Production Rising in Tete 

The director general General Director of the Zambezi Development Planning Office (GPZ), Sergio Vieira, has expressed hopes that tobacco leaf production in the western Mozambican province of Tete would reach 10,000 tonnes in the 2001 crop season. A yield of 10,000 tonnes is considered to be the threshold that would make the construction of a tobacco processing factory viable.

Mozambican tobacco is currently being processed in Malawi due to the low production and lack of local processing units. Vieira said that it was necessary to increase production of tobacco leaves in Mozambique, so that the country can free itself from dependence on the Malawian factories. About 8,000 tonnes were produced in 2000.

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Mozambique Plans To Transport Tobacco On Zambezi River [Source: Africa News Service] 

As plans for building a tobacco processing plant in the western Mozambican province of Tete take shape, the authorities have started floating the idea of using the Zambezi River to transport the leaf tobacco produced in the region.

This was discussed recently during a meeting between the Tete provincial governor, Tomas Mandlate, and the chairman of the Southern Africa Association of Tobacco Producers, Rusty Markhan.

The main agenda of the meeting was to explore the possibility of installing a tobacco-processing factory in Mozambique.

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Malawi Threatens To Ban Mozambican Tobacco 

The Malawi government is reportedly planning another ban on tobacco leaf imports from Mozambique, the country's news agency, AIM reported, quoting a government source.

Mozambican tobacco leaf produced in the central and northern provinces is processed in Malawi before its subsequent export.

In March, Malawi had unilaterally banned the importation of about 7,500 tonnes of Mozambican tobacco leaf. The ban was only lifted after a lot of wrangling between the two sides.

However, according to the unnamed AIM source, a fresh ban was likely to occur soon, judging from statements made by the country's tobacco company, Mozambique Leaf Tobacco.

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Malawian President to Intervene in Tobacco Crisis: Official 

Malawian President Bakili Muluzi may support Mozambique's efforts to lift the unilateral Malawian ban on processing Mozambican tobacco, a Mozambican government source said on Friday.

According to Virgilio Ferrao, governor of the western province of Tete, there is information which "indicates that President Muluzi intends to lift the ban."

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Mozambican Tobacco To Be Exported Via Zimbabwe 

Mozambique is negotiating with Zimbabwe for passage of its tobacco exports after Malawian authorities banned the import of Mozambican tobacco leaf.

Negotiations with Zimbabwean authorities are under way "for the export of our tobacco through Zimbabwe," the provincial governor of Tete, Virgilio Ferrao, told the Mozambican news agency.

The problem of Mozambican tobacco growers is that Mozambique has no tobacco processing industry. Normally their crop was processed in Malawi before it was exported. Panic over low prices on the Malawi tobacco floors this season has led to a sudden ban on the import of foreign tobacco leaf.

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