History of Mozambique History of Mozambique Mozambique was a Portuguese colony, overseas province and later a member state of Portugal. It gained independence from Portugal in 1975. In 2007 Julio Mercader, of the University of Calgary, recovered dozens of 100,000-year-old stone tools from a deep limestone cave near Lake Niassa in Mozambique showing that wild sorghum, the ancestor of the chief cereal consumed today in sub-Saharan Africa for flours, breads, porridges and alcoholic beverages, was being consumed by "Homo sapiens" along with African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges and the African "potato." This is the earliest direct evidence of
Food security in Mozambique non-existent. Mozambique suffers from multiple plagues. The most devastating by far for agriculture is the red locust, which is endemic in the Pungwe basin. Mozambique is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters such as droughts and floods, with a total of 15 over the last 25 years. These events greatly damaged the rural sector and the country’s overall economy. For example, the floods of 2000 affected some 2 million people, while the droughts of 1994 and 1996 affected 1.5 million people in the southern and central parts of the country. Cyclones in Mozambique occur during the cropping season, from October to