Every planting season, the women of Mapai-Ngale village near the Limpopo River in Mozambique face a tough dilemma. 'If we cultivate small fields on the extremely fertile lowlands near the Limpopo, we risk losing our whole crop to frequent floods. If we cultivate the infertile land on higher ground, we face losing our crops to drought,' said Maria Antonio Namburete, a 52-year-old widow and mother of five.
In recent years, climate change has wreaked havoc on this village of 500 people.

The Mozambican Labour Ministry has withdrawn the work permits of three Chinese citizens. A Labour Ministry press release, issued last Thursday, said that the three men all belonged to the Chinese building company Nantong Constructions, and had been working in Sanga district, in the northern province of Niassa. All three were accused of brutal assaults against Mozambican workers.

Mozambique has scored poorly in this year's edition of the Open Budget Index (OBI) - but when the report was presented at a Maputo seminar on Thursday, dissenting voices wondered whether the scores mean anything, since the questionnaires used seemed to be tailored round American experience. The scores range from zero to 100. The US-based International Budget Partnership (IBP) assessed 94 countries - and found that 74 of them did not meet what it considered 'the minimum standards of transparency and responsibility in public budgets'.

Delayed test results often mean HIV patients in Mozambique fail to get timely treatment, but new technology is reducing the need to send tests to far away laboratories, and speeding up test results and HIV treatment. Mozambique’s Ministry of Health has increasingly begun experimenting with new technology to make diagnosing and monitoring HIV patients quicker and easier. After a successful 2009 pilot the country has nationally rolled out SMS or text message printers, which transmit the results of infant HIV tests electronically from two central reference laboratories in Maputo and the northern provincial capital, Nampula, to more than 275 health centres.

For HIV patients in Africa, monthly trips to refill antiretroviral (ARV) prescriptions cost time and money that may be in short supply. But a new strategy being pioneered in Mozambique is easing the burden of monthly refills for patients and the health system. Developed by health workers with the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the strategy centres on self-formed, community-based groups of ARV patients who work as a team to collect their drugs and monitor each other for treatment adherence and general health.

The Mozambican Parliament has assured the Mozambican branch of the regional press freedom body Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA-Mozambique) that a Bill on Freedom of Information will be debated in the near future. Announcing this on 28 September 2010 the Director of MISA-Mozambique, Alfredo Libombo, said that all three political parties in the Assembly (the ruling Frelimo Party, the former rebel movement Renamo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement, MDM) were in agreement on this, and that the assembly’s bill will be based on a draft that MISA deposited with parliament almost five years ago, in November 2005.

Food analyst Raj Patel, on his blog, featured the Mozambican Farmers Union's (UNAC) statement on the Maputo protests, in which the social movement stated 'there's something rotten in the kingdom of globalization'. UNAC focuses on the need to concentrate on internal food production and marketing, in what it refers to as “food sovereignty” approach. For a comprehensive round-up of what bloggers and other commentators said in the aftermath of the Mozambique food riots, read the Global Voices article available through the link provided.

On 1 - 2 September, in popular neighbourhoods of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, and in the town of Matola, in the industrial belt of Maputo, there were extremely violent demonstrations and looting. UNAC, the National Union of Peasant Farmers, condemns both the use of blind repression and lethal force on the part of the forces of law and order, and the unjustifiable destruction by some elements of the population of buildings, vehicles , filling stations and other structures.

BHP Billiton was guilty of double standards by complicating public access to documents about a planned filter shutdown at its Mozambican aluminium smelter, an activist said on Friday. “I don't understand how a corporate like BHP can do one thing in South Africa and across the border it does something completely different,” said environmental activist Sandy Camminga.

Mozambique plans to register non-contract cell phone users, weeks after an anonymous viral text message campaign fuelled riots that killed 14. Communications Minister Paulo Zucula said the new law would improve security for internet banking and prevent crime. 'The main idea is to educate citizens about the way to use, with responsibility, the services put in place by the state,' he said.

After she became a mother just before her 15th birthday, Diana Ricardo* was forced to drop out of school and give up her dreams of a brighter future. Ricardo says she was impregnated by a teacher, who afterwards refused paternity testing claiming he could not afford a second wife. Ricardo’s case is not unique. Worrying statistics around sexual abuse in schools and high female drop-out rates means Mozambique and other countries in the sub-Saharan Africa region may not reach the 2015 education and gender targets set out in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

External donors contributed some US$1.6 billion in aid to the government of Mozambique in 2009. These donors have all committed to making aid more effective by adhering to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and to the Accra Agenda for Action. However information about how much money is available, how it is being spent and what are the results of that aid are still poor, says this study.

The recent Mozambican food and fuel riots raise the spectre of food insecurity and social unrest in the future, writes Saliem Fakir. 'We certainly have the capability to feed all of the world’s population, but the political economy of agriculture, food production and distribution somewhat has a greater influence as to whether people can feed themselves or not.'

Following reports of poor harvest expectations in central and southern provinces due to a prolonged dry spell, an FAO/WFP Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CFSAM) visited the country from 6 to 29 May 2010. The Mission evaluated food crop production in the 2009/10 agricultural season, assessed the overall food supply situation, forecast cereal import requirements and possible exports in marketing year 2010/11 (April/March) and determined the eventual food aid needs.

It's time for a quiet tea break at Macomia Seconday School in northern Mozambique but the schoolyard is abuzz with the cries of babies - enough so that one might mistake it for a kindergarten. The babies are being carted around by a group of older boys and girls, the type you might typically meet at a secondary school. Sometimes they bring the youngsters to their mothers for breastfeeding.

Friends of the Earth Europe has strongly criticised an agreement expected to be announced today by EU and Brazilian leaders to expand biofuels in Mozambique. The agreement to promote biofuels in Africa to power European cars is described as "immoral and perverse."

Parliamentarians in Mozambique are currently facing a challenge by an advocacy group new to the country's political scene, on an issue most people are unwilling to even talk about - sex work. The newly formed Mozambique chapter of the Pan African Sex Workers Alliance (ASWA) are pressing parliament to recognise the rights of sex workers, especially to ensure their health and security.

New research identifying Haiti and Mozambique as the countries most vulnerable to economic losses from natural disasters also classifies a number of industrialised economies, including Italy, Japan, China, USA, Spain and France, as "high risk" environments for investors, insurers and business.

The Mozambican government has adopted various policies to address the effects of climate change, with special attention to women as studies show that they are more adversely affected by this phenomenon. The south-east African country, with its coastline of 2,700 km stretching along the Indian Ocean, has increasingly been subjected to environmental disasters over the past decade.

Mozambique is rapidly improving its road and rail connections with neighbouring countries, most of which have higher HIV prevalence. Government now wishes to halt the expected boost in HIV infections along these inroads. Improved road and rail infrastructure in Mozambique, including the establishment of the Maputo, Beira and Nacala corridors and new bridges connecting to Malawi and Tanzania, is rapidly expanding the transport sector and increasingly linking the country with its neighbours.