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DW (File photo)
Mozambique’s National Union of Peasants (UNAC) has expressed concern at the occurrence of conflicts caused by the expropriation of land from peasant farmers.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, during an international conference on land and seeds in Maputo, UNAC chairperson Ana Paula Tuacale said it was urgent to introduce agrarian reforms that would halt such land usurpation.
She said the Land Law, which guarantees peasant land rights, is being violated, and one reason for this is that peasants do not know about the law. She said that, in areas where it has members, UNAC is working to ensure that they all know what the law contains.
“The Land Law benefits UNAC, but it is being violated in some places because the peasants are seeing their land taken from them”, she said. “One of the problems is that this law has still not been correctly divulged among the communities, and so many peasants do not even know that it exists”.
Tuacale said that UNAC is finalising a national plan to support peasant agriculture. This would be a tool for implementing the agrarian policies proposed by peasants, in order to ensure better performance of the public policies intended to promote peasant agriculture.
Connected with this plan UNAC, in partnership with other civil society organisations, has submitted a proposal to the government entitled “contribution to a change in the socio-economic and food performance of agriculture in Mozambique”, aimed at ensuring better implementation of the government’s strategic programmes for the promotion of agriculture and food production.
Despite the challenges facing UNAC, Tuacale said it remains committed to producing food for the Mozambican nation.
“We shall continue mobilising for a world where we have an equitable distribution of our wealth, particularly in our country, without exclusion, and where social justice is a reality”, she pledged.
The two day conference has brought together UNAC provincial delegates and various other bodies linked to agriculture under the theme “peasants united in the struggle to defend the land and peasant agriculture”.
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