Tomorrow's Harvest

As the sun sets in Ribáuè, the small town in Northern Mozambique wraps up another day with tomorrow's harvest in mind. Ribáuè, known as the "granary" of Mozambique, is one of the key productive areas in a country where about 80% of the population are dedicated to agriculture. It's also a land of agitation and struggle for farmers, where productivity has fallen sharply in the last decades. The blame, according to local authorities, is on farmers' hard heads. "They don't want to adapt to new techniques". Meanwhile, public investment remains at a bare minimum, with great amounts of public funds and grants lost or unreturned. Farmers in Ribáuè and neighboring Chicá or Namigonha welcomed us in their fields and told us the story of agriculture and development in their land. These are some of the faces fighting for a country that remained the third poorest in the world in 2012.

"In our reality, women spend most of the time in the field. Man and woman may work the field together, but it's the woman who does the weeding, and that takes a long time."

"The only influence we have is with the maquea; the spirits listen to us. But that’s all we do: we just cover the house in mud and then the Régulo (local leader) stays while we have to leave. People don’t transmit what we teach... They don’t even listen to us!"

"My husband? He can't do this! It's a woman's job to protect the house."

"People born in small communities have a really hard time adapting to the new ways. Everything that's new gets them confused; we can't just give them the technology.

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