Participants during the meeting at DNE

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in co-ordination with the Energy National Directorate, held last Wednesday a technical meeting to present the project to assess the Sustainability and Replicability of Integrated Food Energy Systems (IFES).

This project is also implemented in Brazil and Ghana, in order to facilitate the exchange of experiences between the three countries.

This meeting is part of a technical mission visit from the Sustainable Agriculture Division of FAO headquarters in Rome (Italy).

The event was attended by technical staff from the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy (MIREME), Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (MASA), the Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development (MITADER), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education and Teaching Professional Technical (MCTESTP), NGO´s and private sector who discussed about the challenges of bioenergy projects in the country.

According to the project coordinator, Anne Bogdanski, "FAO aims through this study to bring notions of good practices for integrated energy systems and ensure their sustainability".
Bogdanski also said that "Mozambique is one of the chosen countries because already has programmes and policies for bioenergy production".

According to the FAO´s Coordinator of the Bioenergy Group within the Climate, Energy and Tenure Division, Oliver Dubois, "there are conditions to support the governments, investors, private sector, communities and farmers to produce bioenergy with reduced risks".

Dubois also said that "the bioenergy must be seen as part of an opportunity to invest in the agricultural sector and the chosen areas to produce bioenergy must be selected by the local agents who know better the conditions".

According to the Assistant Director of the National Energy Directorate, Marcelina Mataveia, "this study will serve as an example to learn and see what are the possibilities of replicability, and also to the exchange experiences between the countries concerned and may help on political decision-making".

The analytical framework of the 5 months long study aims at evaluating four integrated energy and food systems projects existing in the country.