NYUSI STRESSES INTEREST IN DEFENCE COOPERATON WITH INDIA

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi on Friday repeated the interest of both Mozambique and India in boosting their cooperation in maritime security.Speaking at a press conference in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the state of Gujarat, at the end of a three day state visit to India, Nyusi recalled that ships from the Indian navy have put in regularly to Mozambican ports, and have carried out hydrographic surveys in Maputo and Beira.The Indian navy had played an important role in the fight against piracy in the Indian Ocean. It was Indian warships which, in 2011, hunted down Somali pirates who had seized a Mozambican fishing vessel, the “Vega 5” and enslaved its crew. The Indians were able to release most of the Mozambican crew members and return them to Beira.Other maritime threats to be countered, Nyusi added, include illegal fishing and pollution on the high seas (this takes the form, for example, of ships illegally flushing out their tanks in the Mozambique Channel).Mozambique was working with its immediate neighbours, South Africa and Tanzania, to improve security in the Mozambique Channel, Nyusi said, and some Mozambican seamen have undergone training on Indian ships that pass through the Channel.At Nyusi’s discussions with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, both men spoke of the need to boost their security cooperation, although so far no specific measures have been mentioned. The two leaders agreed that a meeting of the Mozambique-India joint working group on defence cooperation should be held in the near future.Nyusi told the Mozambican journalists who had accompanied him to India that the visit had succeeded in all its objectives. “We aimed to strengthen our relations of friendship and cooperation, and to boost our economic ties”, he said. “I believe we have certainly achieved these goals”.60 Mozambican business people were on the Presidential delegation, and Nhyusi spoke at two business forums, one in New Delhi and one in Ahmedabad. Among the messages he delivered, Nyusi said, was that, while there is no single solution to poverty relief in Mozambique, “neither mining, nor tourism, we are now stressing agriculture”,In Amedabad, Nyusi visited the Arvind Mills textile factory, where he had been briefed on all aspects of this company’s cotton and textile production, including the use of improved cotton seeds, laboratories to test the soils, and all the manufacturing processes leading from the harvesting of cotton to ready made clothes.Some of the necessary facilities for the industrialization of Mozambican agriculture were already in place, Nyusi said. This was the case, for example, with a soil laboratory that he had recently inaugurated in the northern city of Nampula. A similar facility already existed in Sussundenga, in the central province of Manica.“Productivity will only rise if we know which types of seeds do well in which types of soil”, the President added. “It is better if we use seeds that are already resistant to pests and diseases”.Nyusi was confident that Mozambican peasant farmers want to improve the technology they use. “Our farmers want to use tractors and abandon the short handled hoe”, he declared.