Climate Change Threatens Mozambican Agriculture and Trade

Mozambique’s 2025/26 cyclone season has exerted the Southeast African state on a scale unforeseen in size and destruction. Weeks of torrential rainfall and destructive floods have ravaged the country, displacing an estimated 400,000 people and destroying thousands of acres of farmland, primarily in the southern province of Gaza and central province of Zambezia. Not only do these weather events come at a high humanitarian cost, they also illustrate the worsening consequences of climate change within the agricultural and trade sectors of an already impoverished country.

With 36 million hectares of arable land and abundant natural resources, Mozambique’s agriculture forms the backbone of its economy. The agricultural sector, largely subsistence-based farming, provides income for 70 percent of the population and is projected to continue to grow its contribution to Mozambique’s GDP in the coming years. Intensified flooding and rainfall, exacerbated by the nation’s geographical vulnerability to the effects of El Niño and La Niña, threaten the future of the coastal nation’s agricultural sector by destroying crops, damaging agricultural areas, and forcing farmers to abandon their land.

In areas unaffected by the cyclone season’s events, drought presents another challenge to achieving successful crop yields. Poor harvests resulting from El Niño-induced drought have rendered farming in impacted areas impossible, as the majority of Mozambican farmers rely on rain rather than irrigation to water their fields. The nation is caught between the extremes of too little water and too much.

Such events also damage Mozambique’s ability to participate in international trade. Besides serving the domestic population, the country’s cash crops of sugar, tobacco, cotton, sesame, and cashews support the export economy, totaling $700 million in 2014; and together with services, contributing to 60 percent of GDP growth in 2022. As of December 2025, approximately 173,000 acres of crops have been destroyed in Mozambique, Estwatini, Zimbabwe, and part of South Africa. This loss not only reduces domestic sales but also increases reliance on food imports and widens the trade deficit. 

In particular, Mozambique’s reliance on South Africa is at risk of increasing. While South Africa has similarly experienced flooding and heavy rainfall, its location is preferable to Mozambique’s, whose downstream position among substantial river basins, joined with high-volume upstream water release, leaves it more vulnerable to extreme weather. South Africa is the country’s largest trading partner, and the poorer Mozambique will not be able to recover as quickly as the wealthier and better-equipped South Africa.

While domestic solutions exist, global action to reduce emissions and implement more sustainable practices have yet to reverse its effects. It is likely that conditions will continue to worsen as temperatures rise across the world and weather increases in intensity. Remedies specific to Mozambique are the most actionable and realistic, although they only offer mitigation as opposed to permanent change.

Mozambique’s National Adaptation Program of Action, a plan based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, recommends increasing public awareness of climate change, increasing agricultural resilience, and improving management of water resources, among others. The plan also calls for more robust climate finance, which it describes as "deficient." With the lack of climate-directed funds in mind, successes caused by the plan's recommendations are too small to make a major difference at best and nonexistent at worst.

Mozambique National Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Strategy, an additional national action plan adopted in 2013, faces the same challenges. 94 percent of government spending is predicted to go to operational expenses in 2026, with only 6 percent going to domestic development. Despite receiving generous funding from international third parties, financial investment alone cannot fully address a problem on the scale of climate change.  

As fields become waterlogged and farms are left entrenched in mud and debris, the future of Mozambique's agricultural industry and trade sector appears bleak. Widespread collective action is needed to slow and eventually reverse climate change in its tracks, but while Mozambicans are forced to flee their livelihoods, such a national endeavor remains impossible. The floodwaters bring destruction, but more pressingly demonstrate climate change’s capacity to wreak economic havoc.