After an "unfortunate" speech by the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Celso Correia, according to which "90% of the population has safe food, that is, they can already have three meals a day", criticism came from all sides of the country.

The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), a non-governmental organization (NGO), says that Celso Correia should apologize to the more than 50% of Mozambicans who suffer from hunger. According to the NGO, the minister "blatantly lied in front of a top representative of the United Nations agency and offended nearly 20 million Mozambicans who live below the poverty line".

from the poverty line". The NGO also says that this is not the first time that Minister Celso Correia has made a misleading statement. According to the NGO, the SUSTENTA agrarian program's narrative of success does not stand up when confronted with official data on food insecurity in Mozambique.

"It is curious, to say the least, that in a country with a poverty prevalence rate above 50%, there are enough resources for 90% of the population to have safe food and get three meals a day," says the NGO document that MZNews had access to.

According to the NGO's data, Mozambique currently has 59.9% of the total population living below the poverty line ($1.90/day) and with low access to basic social services, a deterioration from the 46.1% recorded in 2014/2015.

The NGO also points out that the country is still a long way from achieving the Sustainable Development Goal on the Eradication of Poverty (SDG) by 2030.

"These estimates do not seem to support the (false) ′data′ of the Minister of Agriculture. On the contrary, the high prevalence rates of poverty in the country, combined with the low coverage of social support programs, tend to result in situations of prevalence of hunger and malnutrition among the most vulnerable section of the population."

The NGO stresses that food insecurity in Mozambique is still critical and affects a large part of the population.

To justify its position, the NGO draws on the report "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022"3, which estimated the prevalence of severe food insecurity in Mozambique at around 40,40% between 2019 and 2021, which means that 12.60 million Mozambicans had little or no access to food, facing acute hunger and malnutrition.

It should be noted that the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development stated in Rome, during a meeting with the Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that 90% of the population has safe food.