Mozambique aims to cut poverty and create jobs

from Reuters South Africa

By Charles Mangwiro

MAPUTO (Reuters) - Mozambique wants to reduce poverty significantly by 2009 through creating more jobs and small enterprises in the agriculture sector, a government minister said on Tuesday.

Planning and Development Minister Aiuba Quereneia told Reuters in an interview that 54 percent of the southern African country's 20 million population currently lived in poverty.

he government aims to cut this to 45 percent in 2009.

"We are pressing for the establishments of small and medium enterprises, a 'Green Revolution' in agriculture, its marketing and transportation," he said.

"Therefore we are allocating an annual $205 million to 128 districts in order to cut poverty from the current 54 percent to 45 percent by 2009."

Quereneia said Mozambique would lay the groundwork for subsistence peasant farmers to be transformed into commercial farmers.

This will need improvements in distribution of seeds and fertiliser, production diversification, good use of water, and ensuring that there are buyers for crops.

"It is a broad programme which also includes the simplification of business processes in Mozambique when it comes to investments in other sectors, we have a Public Reform Programme whose key platform is to remove barriers when one wants to start a business", he said.

The International Monetary Fund has praised Mozambique for its impressive annual growth rates but said this does not filter through to ordinary people.

"Despite the authorities' efforts, poverty levels are still high, and there is a need to develop policies towards employment generation and improvement of income distribution within the different regions of the country," the IMF said in a statement last week after a visit by a mission of IMF executive directors.

Mozambique was one of the poorest nations in the world at the end of a 17-year civil war in 1992, but has had one of the fastest-growing economies in southern African in the past decade.