Agriculture has been historically the most important sector to Mozambique’s economy. It is the main income source for nearly 67% of the active labor. Nevertheless, the reality is that nearly five decades since the country’s independence, agriculture is yet dominated by subsistence-oriented smallholder farmers (SHFs). Over the years the sector has undergone through several government agendas focusing on reducing poverty by enhancing agriculture productivity. This is often regarded as a relevant strategy to achieve sustainable development in economies alike. This context is similar in many developing countries in the Sub-Saharan region. As such, this research focus on analyzing the signals from the agriculture and labor participation around the agricultural landscape in Mozambique. Understanding those signals can be deemed relevant to evaluate and realign the type of policy interventions that is required to accelerate the transformation of agriculture in the context of Mozambique and economies-alike. We adopt an explanatory trend analysis. We look at subsistence-oriented crops, traditional cash crops and emerging cash crops segments. We covered annual data from the available national agricultural surveys over the period 2002-2020. Our findings suggest that the overall agriculture sector is backsliding. The only exception is on the emerging cash crops segment. Nevertheless, the percentage of SHFs engaged in this segment is yet very low. Therefore, we advocate for a rethinking of the public support to agriculture aiming at capitalizing the emerging trends, whilst not neglecting the need to consolidate and avoid the free-rider problem for the most traditional cropping segments.

Keywords: Agriculture Landscape, Trends, Mozambique, Policy