The starting point for development in Mozambique must be the rural areas, declared President Armando Guebuza on Wednesday.

Speaking at the opening session in Maputo of the Annual Meeting of the African Development Bank (ADB), Guebuza said “we shall overcome the challenges of economic emancipation by making the rural areas the nuclei of planning and development”.

He warned that the problems of rural poverty will not be solved “by the simple liberalization of prices. On the contrary, reality shows us that measures to liberalise and make flexible the economy can in the countryside generate the opposite effects, in the absence of structural measures that seek to deal with the causes of the isolation of rural areas from the rest of the national economy”.

Throughout Africa, Guebuza continued, there was a lack of transport and communications infrastructure to bring regions together and “to link centres of production with centres of consumption”. But the free functioning of markets “presupposes the existence of infrastructures that facilitate these linkages”.

To bring these infrastructures into the countryside, and to provide rural dwellers with efficient institutions providing public services “are the major challenges we face in the struggle to develop Mozambique”, he said.

“We advocate endogenous development, with strong participation by the beneficiaries, including the private sector”, the President stressed, “and which is expressed in increased agricultural production and productivity, increased household income, the creation of rural markets, and the encouragement of agro-industry”.

Turning to the sharp rises in oil and grain prices, Guebuza warned that these “have an impact on the productive sector, on the balance of payments and on the state budget. This is not just a problem of food security. We are facing a large scale social and economic problem”.

He called on the international community to commit itself more decisively “in the collective search for solutions to this challenge, which in countries such as ours can interfere in our programme to fight against poverty and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals”.

Guebuza hoped that the ADB meeting could reach consensus on the paths to follow. “We must act more speedily than the speed at which oil prices are rising”, he insisted. “Let us turn this challenge into an opportunity to strengthen our partnerships and accelerate the development of our countries”.

The Minister of Planning and Development, Aiuba Cuereneia, who is the current chairperson of the ADB’s Board of Governors, also stressed the energy and food crises. He noted that the price of a tonne of rice has risen from 373 US dollars at the start of the year to 760 dollars now. Wheat had reached the price of 412 dollars a tonne, and even maize, the staple food for much of Africa, had risen by 29 per cent, from 171 to 220 dollars a tonne.

This hit African economies severely, he said, and in particular would “increase poverty levels in African cities”. Nonetheless, Cuereneia urged African leaders to turn the threats into an opportunity “to make better use of Africa’s potential, such as its land and natural resources so that we can face the crisis by increasing production and productivity”.