Outside Lichinga in northern Mozambique, a group of young men lie across the road warming themselves on the sun-soaked asphalt. To one side stand hundreds of acres of pine forests owned by Norwegian company Green Resources, the legacy of a programme that had promised to bring wealth and employment to the most impoverished region in the country. On the other side stand maize fields that surround the homes of local small-scale farmers who, like the majority of Mozambicans, still rely on subsistence farming for survival.
The plantations were the initiative of the Swedish government-funded Malonda programme. One of the first foreign-investment initiatives in the Niassa region, it ushered in a large-scale pine and eucalyptus forestry project managed by the Chikweti company (a subsidiary of the Swedish investment firm GSFF).
