Africa-Press – Mozambique. Mozambican Agriculture Minster Celso Correia warned on Thursday that the government intends to crack down on exporters who attempt to defraud the state by falsifying the real value of their goods, stated on the export declarations.
Speaking at Carapira, in Monapo district, in the northern province of Nampula, at a meeting with stakeholders in the government’s flagship agricultural development progamme, Sustenta, Correia said his Ministry is working with the customs service and other authorities “so that we can bring order to exports”.
He called for honesty from all exporters, “since we are in a moment of many adversities, and the lives of thousands of Mozambicans are at stake”.
This was a time “in which nobody expects to see nations and investments grow, but we are managing to open factories, and to see our warehouses full of food. It must not be the exporting class which puts at risk our path and our objectives”.
He urged producers to be vigilant about the prices at which they sell their crops, so that the business is fair, and household income continues to grow.
Exporters, he added, should accept their responsibility to make accurate declarations of the value of their exports “because it is important that foreign exchange enters Mozambique, and everybody in this value chain should pay attention because it is the income of Mozambican households that is at stake”.
“We are not going to be complacent with situations in which our production is undervalued”, he stressed. “We are not going to allow us to be considered a country of thieves because of a handful of people who are making millions. The efforts of thousands of producers must not be endangered because, in ports such as Nacala or Beira, we are not monitoring the value of the products that are leaving the country, and the money that is coming in”.
Correia also announced that this year Mozambique has registered an increase of 20 per cent in the production of sesame, cotton and soya, which he attributed to the government’s creation of the Mozambique Institute of Oilseeds.
“20 per cent is a significant value in exports”, he said. “But now we must be certain that this production, exported via the port of Nacala leaves at a fair price. When someone who exports a product which is worth 1,000 dollars a tonne on the international market but only registers 500 dollars a tonne with the finance department, that means that only half the foreign exchange that should enter Mozambique does so. Where does the rest of the money go?”
He declared that, on the government’s calculation, this year’s production of sesame should being in 150 million US dollars.
Also on Thursday, Correia inaugurated in Nacala port a unit to pre-process Sesame, owned by the company “Agrico Marketing” which befitted from financing under the Sustenta programme.
