Mozambican activists told Lusa on Friday that the lack of investment in the agricultural sector to deal with floods such as this year's is exacerbating the vulnerability of families, worsening food insecurity and poverty in the country.

"It's inevitable [that there will be famines], because people no longer have their fields, they can no longer move around due to the blockage of communication routes and they can no longer sell their produce," explained João Mosca, an economist and researcher at the Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR), a Mozambican non-governmental organization (NGO), at a time when many families have seen their agricultural fields, the main source of food, destroyed by heavy rain.

"Poverty levels and food insecurity levels are, of course, skyrocketing, without the government having the capacity to deal with it all," he added.

In terms of infrastructure, "a lot of irrigated land in the lower reaches of rivers doesn't have drainage or dredging systems" and "the riverbeds are very silted up", he said, also highlighting the fact that no dykes have been built to contain flooding.

The researcher also criticized uncontrolled deforestation in areas close to rivers, destroying "a natural curtain" against rising flows.

"There are no systems for defending the fields with curtains of trees, which could protect the fields from wind and rain," he emphasized.

João Mosca, who ran state agricultural enterprises before becoming an independent researcher, questioned the concentration of investment in cash crops such as cotton, tobacco and sesame, to the detriment of food agriculture.

The researcher also said that there are rudimentary farming techniques that prevent water from flowing away, causing floods and destroying crops.

He pointed to the lack of coordination with neighboring countries, which are upstream of the river basins that cross Mozambique, as one of the factors behind the systematic flooding.

Better coordination between the authorities, he continued, would allow the country to preventively reduce the volume of water it receives in order to create more capacity for its reservoirs.

Luís Muchanga, executive coordinator of the National Peasants' Union (UNAC), a Mozambican NGO, also criticized the lack of investment and public policies that could reduce the vulnerability of the agricultural sector to natural disasters and the impact of climate change.

"When the impacts began to be felt more cyclically, the country had to adopt resilience and adaptation mechanisms," Muchanga said.

The government's stance on this issue, he continued, has been one of "political propaganda".

The peasants' inability to cope with the impact of the bad weather has resulted in the loss of agricultural and animal production, the break-up of families due to mass displacement to new resettlements, and greater impoverishment, he added.

"Peasants are affected in three ways: there is a social dimension, in which we have the displacement of families, there is a cultural dimension, in which peasants are removed from one context and forced to adapt to a new one, and finally there is an economic dimension, in which agricultural production is affected, with the loss of their agricultural and animal production."

Like João Mosca, the president of UNAC also argued that Mozambique should demand greater coordination with neighboring countries in order to better manage discharges from upstream rivers that cross national territory.

"The flooding of the 'machambas' [family farm fields] in the south of the country was aggravated by discharges from dams in South Africa and Zimbabwe and not by rain inside our country," said Muchanga.

Mozambique is experiencing a rainy season with above-average rainfall in various parts of the country.

Natural disasters in this season, which begins every year in October and lasts until mid-April, had already claimed 83 lives by February 13, with at least seven more deaths caused by tropical storm Freddy since last week.

An estimated number of agricultural fields were lost and infrastructure damaged.