The EconomistNovember 16th 2019 Middle East & Africa 452
1northern town, farmers have been helped
by technicians to check market prices and
start a savings group. Onions grow in neat
rows. But this is merely a scratch on an im-
mense landscape. With the main phase of
Prosavana not yet begun, the project has
mostly had the effect of planting the seeds
of a civil-society movement.
The first that many Mozambicans heard
of Prosavana was an article in a Brazilian
newspaper in 2011. “Mozambique offers
land to Brazilian soya”, ran the headline.
The story described Mozambique as “Bra-
zil’s next agricultural frontier” and cited a
claim by a Brazilian agronomist that half of
northern Mozambique was “unpopulated”.
In 2013 a Prosavana planning document
was leaked. Although it stressed the impor-
tance of small farmers, it also envisaged
linking them to corporate farming clusters.
A private-equity fund hoped to raise $2bn
for related agri-business projects.
Activists denounced the scheme as a
“massive land grab”. They went on a study
trip to the cerradoand joined forces with
movements in Brazil and Japan, in a mirror
of Prosavana’s trilateral structure. An open
letter calling for the suspension of the pro-
ject was signed by 23 organisations in Mo-
zambique and 43 abroad. Each side of the
argument saw the other as out of touch and
vaguely foreign—shills of evil corporations
or dupes of clueless ngos.
A gulf opened between two irreconcil-
able world-views. Many farmers in north-
ern Mozambique practise shifting cultiva-
tion, moving to new lands when the soil
needs a rest. Agronomists say that rapid
population growth is making this impossi-
ble. Antonio Limbau, the Mozambican civil
servant who oversees Prosavana, argues
that farmers must use hybrid seeds and
synthetic fertilisers to farm more inten-sively, so that “the same piece of land feeds
more people”.
Farmers call this argument patronising.
“We are not children,” says Costa Estevao,
who leads the peasant union in Nampula
province. He says, accurately, that Prosa-
vana aims to eliminate traditional ways of
cultivation. He worries too about costly
fertiliser and poisonous pesticides. Ana-
bela Lemos, an environmental activist,
says that governments and corporations
want “to destroy the campesina”, or peasant
class. “That’s a big mistake, because they’re
the ones who feed the world,” she says.
This kind of rhetoric reflects a “persis-
tent misunderstanding” of the project,
sighs Hiroaki Endo, who heads the Japa-
nese aid agency in Mozambique. Techno-
crats are still redrafting their master plan,
which they say will benefit small farmers.
But whatever emerges from endless con-
sultations will fulfil neither the hopes nor
the fears invested in it. Brazilian farmers
lost interest in Mozambique when they
discovered the land was less empty than
they thought. And they have since opened a
new agricultural frontier back home,
where the government of Jair Bolsonaro is
letting the forest burn.
An unintended outcome of Prosavana
has been the strengthening of Mozam-
bique’s civil society, which forged new
bonds through its campaign. Meanwhile in
the northern grasslands, farmers invoke
the ghost of the project to explain all kinds
of unrelated mischief. Beside a road in
Nampula province villagers recount the
visit of a strange man who gave no name
but asked for 50 hectares of their land. The
tracks of his bulldozer are still imprinted in
the earth. Who is he? Will he come back?
Locals have no idea, but the word on their
lips is “Prosavana”. 7Home on the cerradoF
oreign staffworking in Burkina Faso
for a Canadian gold-mining company,
Semafo, have the option of flying in heli-
copters over roads infested with bandits
and jihadist. Local employees at its Boun-
gou mine are less fortunate. On November
6th five buses carrying 241 workers drove
straight into a massacre. A survivor told
news agencies that men shouting “Allahu
akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) over-
whelmed their small security escort. The
gunmen sprayed the vehicles with bullets
before boarding and murdering those on
them. At least 39 people were killed and an-
other 60 were wounded.
The attack was but the latest outrage in
Burkina Faso, which is struggling to con-
tain a fast-growing jihadist insurgency.
Along with Mali and Niger, it has become
the main front line against terrorists in the
Sahel, a dry strip of land that runs along the
edge of the Sahara. This year alone the con-
flict has killed more than 1,600 people and
forced half a million from their homes in
Burkina Faso. But the latest incident hints
at a worrying new trend: a battle by jiha-
dists and other armed groups to take con-
trol of the region’s gold rush.
Although gold has long been mined in
the region—Mali is thought to have been
the world’s biggest producer of the pre-
cious metal in the 13th century—it has
boomed in recent years with the discovery
of shallow deposits that stretch from Su-
dan to Mauritania. International mining
companies have invested as much as $5bn
in west African production over the past
decade, but the rush has also lured hun-
dreds of thousands of unsophisticated “ar-
tisanal” miners. The International Crisis
Group (icg), an ngo, reckons that more
than 2m people are involved in small-scale
mining in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. In
total they dig up 40-95 tonnes of gold a
year, worth some $1.9bn-4.5bn.
This rush—in a region where states are
already weak and unable to provide securi-
ty—has sucked in a variety of armed groups
and jihadists, including the likes of Ansar
Dine and Islamic State in the Greater Saha-
ra, which killed four American soldiers in
an ambush in Niger in 2017.
The jihadists probably have direct con-
trol of fewer than ten mines, reckons Math-
ieu Pellerin of the icg.But they have influ-
ence over many more. In some areas
artisanal miners are forced to pay “taxes” to
the jihadists. In others, such as BurkinaDAKAR
Precious metal is funding jihadists and
armed groups across the SahelBullion and bombsJihad and the gold
rush