The impact of economic liberalisation on climate vulnerability among farmers in Mozambique

Rural populations in Southern Africa are exposed to climatic variability and change; such natural pressures, however, interact with other global social processes to shape local vulnerability. Farmers have traditionally coped with crop failure through engaging in a multitude of alternative sources of food and income, most depending on local natural resources, informal networks and local skills and institutions. Economic globalisation, in the form of liberalisation, is reshaping market access by farmer households and changing the premises and the opportunities under which these households respond to climatic changes and extremes, including drought and flood. In this paper, we investigate the constraints and the viability of market-based and 'traditional' or non-commercial coping strategies in the context of liberalization. The paper provides an empirical analysis of household vulnerability in two farming communities in Limpopo River Valley in Mozambique, an area affected both by the severe 2000 floods and the current regional drought-induced food insecurity. Quantitative and qualitative analysis is performed on interview data the way in which market integration affects the local pattern of coping and vulnerability is examined. We find that economic restructuring exposes farmers to new opportunities and risks while at the same time the viability of many coping strategies is limited. It is showed that many farmer households do not have access to commercial markets neither for selling their products or acquiring inputs to prepare and recover from climatic events. We argue that under economic liberalization, vulnerability is becoming increasingly differentiated both socially within a community and geographically between communities.