Good morning and welcome to yesterday's newsletter. Mozambique’s government regularly announces targets for increasing agricultural production, developing value chains and creating domestic industry. But a new publication from the National Statistics Institute suggests that the state does not reliably know how much the country already produces.
INE acknowledges that its agricultural figures for 2021-2025 contain gaps and inconsistencies and cannot always be compared across years. In the absence of dedicated field surveys, figures for cultivated land and crop production in 2021 and 2022 were estimated by the agriculture ministry, while some figures for 2024 came from administrative records.
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INE deserves credit for disclosing these limitations. Statistical uncertainty is unavoidable in a country where much economic activity is rural, informal and difficult to observe. Concealing that uncertainty would be worse. But candour does not solve the underlying problem.
It is impossible to design or evaluate an agricultural policy without a reasonably dependable baseline. If production supposedly rises, policymakers need to know whether farmers actually grew more or whether the method of estimating their output changed. The same applies to government targets, such as the proposed tripling of cotton production from approximately 20,000 to 60,000 tonnes. Without consistent measurements, success can be declared—or failure concealed—by changing the figures being compared.
