Mozambique 2013

Mozambique Population Density

Yearbook 2013

Mozambique. During the year, the contradictions were sharpened between the country’s socialist government party FRELIMO and the largest opposition party RENAMO, which refers to itself as center-right. RENAMO was accused of being behind several attacks aimed primarily at the country’s government soldiers and police forces.

In June, RENAMO carried out several attacks against people traveling on the country’s traffic routes in order to paralyze car and train traffic on some of the most important transport routes. At one time, two civilians were killed, leading to demonstrations around the country.

According to Countryaah, the conflict between the rival parties has been going on for a long time. Already during the 1977–92 civil war, the guerrilla movement RENAMO, or the MNR as the party was then called, fought FRELIMO, which has been in power in Mozambique ever since the independence from Portugal in 1975. In October 2013, RENAMO announced that they were canceling the peace agreement from 1992. The decision came after government forces has taken RENAMO’s headquarters in the Gorongosa Mountains in central Mozambique. According to RENAMO, the government was looking to kill party leader Afonso Dhlakama, who however managed to escape from the area. RENAMO has repeatedly sought to renegotiate the agreement with a view to gaining more political influence, but also to gain part of the increased income from, among other things. gas and oil.

Mozambique Population Density

During the fall local elections were held, which FRELIMO won in most parts of the country, while the relatively newly formed opposition party Mozambique’s Democratic Movement (MDM) advanced strongly, largely because RENAMO boycotted the election. MDM consists mainly of defunct RENAMO supporters. During the summer, a large number of farmers and their families protested against the Brazilian mining company Vale do Rio Doce, which since 2011 produces coal in Moatize in the Tete province of western Mozambique. The peasants felt that they had not been sufficiently compensated for the land they lost when the company established itself in the area, and in conjunction with this, large sections of the population were forced to relocate from their homes, often to places with meager land that is poorly suited for business.

  • According to AbbreviationFinder.org, Maputo is the capital city of Mozambique. See acronyms and abbreviations related to this capital and other major cities within this country.

Since one of the world’s largest unexploded coal fields was discovered in the Tete province, many have hoped that mining will lead to more jobs and, above all, increased export revenue for the Mozambican state. The government has been driving the coal mining project in Tete, but many analysts believe that this type of business will not contribute to reducing poverty in Mozambique, which, despite record growth in recent years, is still one of the world’s poorest countries. Since most of the mines in the country are owned by foreign companies, a large part of the revenues go abroad, and only one-third of the employees in the Moatizi mine are said to come from Tete.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), land grabbing or ground robbery, which means that foreign companies take over large land areas in poorer countries by means of questionable methods, has increased in several sub-Saharan African countries. In countries like Mozambique, where the majority of the population rely on small-scale farming, land grabbing often has severe consequences.

MOZAMBIQUE. – Portuguese overseas province, Mozambique, after having obtained the equalization of its residents with Portuguese citizens in 1961, rose up with arms against the motherland in 1964 and, led by the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), on 25 June 1975 it achieved independence.

The demographic census of 1970 revealed a population of 8,233,978 residents, With an increase of 17% compared to 1960. The increase took place mainly in the coastal area, where Maputo (formerly Lourenço Marques) doubled its residents, while the internal centers have often experienced a significant decline. The distribution of the population by districts is shown in the following table:

In the last decade Portugal, in order to resist the nationalist offensive, had started an ambitious program of economic enhancement of the Mozambique, including the construction of the CaboraBassa dam on the Zambezi; with the 1968-73 five-year plan, specifically, he had attempted an organic planning of the territory, aiming at attracting foreign investments. But the guerrillas have hindered its implementation and so the resources of Mozambique, potentially considerable, remain underutilized.

Agriculture affects only 3.9% of the total area, while permanent meadows and pastures occupy 56.2%, forests and woods 24.8%, uncultivated and unproductive 15.1%. The main agricultural areas, aimed at commercial production, are those of recent development along the Limpopo and Zambezi valleys, along the railway to Malawi and around Quelimane.

Among the crops of commercial importance, the first place was earned by cotton, which occupies on average one seventh of the agricultural surface (270,000 ha, 480,000 q of seeds and 250,000 q of fiber in 1975), but considerable space is also reserved for cane sugar (63,000 ha), which closely follows cotton in terms of export value. Coconut palm (412,000 t of walnuts, 680,000 q of copra), tea (15,400 ha, 195,000 q of leaves), tobacco (5700 ha, 35,000 q), peanut (1, 4 million q) and cashew, for which Mozambique is the first world producer (200,000 t of cashew nuts). Among the subsistence crops, spread throughout the country and practiced mostly in itinerant form, the most extensive are those of maize (680,000 ha, 2.5 million q), cassava (23 million q) and sorghum (250,000 ha, 1.8 million q), while the production of rice, wheat and millet remains irrelevant, covering only a few thousand hectares. Irrelevant, despite its constant increase and in relation to the large extension of the meadows and pastures, also the breeding remains (1.4 million cattle, 568,000 goats, 180,000 pigs), which the snare of the tsetse fly limits almost exclusively to the central-southern part of the country.