Irrigation public policy for whom?

challenges and advances for small farmers traders in the Chokwé irrigated perimeter - Mozambique

Abstract

This article aims to highlight the directions, challenges and perspectives arising from the public irrigation policy adopted through the National Irrigation Strategy (ENI) for the agrarian space of the irrigated perimeter of Chókwé – Mozambique. For this purpose, the socioeconomic advances and challenges faced by small agricultural producers and their efforts to remain in this changing territory were analyzed. We start with some hypotheses, highlighting i), processes of deterritorialization of small producers and consequent replacement by medium and large producers, capable of bearing the investments demanded by these policies; ii). Dispossession and expropriation of territories and increased marginalization of labor in the perimeters; and, iii) precariousness of work with the transformation of small producers into informal, seasonal and dispossessed workers in their workforce and knowledge of those spaces. This study was possible through: i), bibliographical survey and official documents that gave subsidies for a first reflection on the trajectory of irrigation policies; ii). Application of field observation techniques and respective records, including iconographic ones, updating revised secondary information on the appropriate scale; and, iii), application of semi-structured questionnaires, seeking to combine qualitative and quantitative data that illustrate the dynamics of irrigation policy actions in the study area. The results show discrepancies between what is socially advertised as benefits for those who have been historically settled in that territory. There is a worsening of the survival crisis for small producers without material conditions to access the "supposed benefits", they are dispossessed and or urged to marginalize in the production and reproduction process of life through the precariousness of their survival as "invisible workers" of agro-industrial systems.