It seemed that finally the government had woken up to the need for food security. And for a while a good show was made out of it. At the start of the pandemic, the MBC aired footage of Agriculture Minister Maneesh Gobin conducting a roundtable discussion with some of the largest landowning companies in the country. Food security was on the lips of government, opposition and some private sector firms spooked by the prospect of export restrictions by large food-exporting nations, disruptions in supply chains and a falling rupee making food more expensive in Mauritius just as it stares down the face of massive unemployment and falling foreign exchange. Not a small consideration: food production in Mauritius has been falling: in 2012, Mauritius produced 121,106 tonnes of food crops and in 2019 just 93,736 tonnes. Then, as suddenly as it rose, the enthusiasm for food security seems to have died.

The budget shows that even Covid-19 was not enough to really change anything. The biggest obstacle to food security is the fact that for the last two decades, landowners (with the connivance of the government) have turned arable land into real estate for well-heeled foreigners. What does this budget – after all the crocodile tears over food security – say? It wants the EDB to fast-track projects in the pipeline (how many of them are for more IRS/PDS/Smart City developments?) and it wants to make it easier for rich foreign retirees and professionals to move to Mauritius and buy real estate. The private sector is still looking to put all its eggs in flipping real estate and the government is, as usual, helping it along. Avoiding a real estate crash through the lack of foreign buyers is obviously much higher in the priorities of the government than food security.

The budget also plans to guarantee a price of Rs25,000 per tonne of cane for sugar planters. For years the government has tried to keep people growing cane (also in part to supply bagasse to Independent Power Producers) by subsidising sugar prices in a losing battle where global sugar prices have tumbled and where the cost of producing sugar in Mauritius is higher than global sugar prices on the market. Rather than shift them to food production, the government has simply continued to subsidise sugar production, delaying the problem for another year.

The most problematic proposal in the budget is to allow small planters to convert 10 per cent of their land to build houses and commercial properties on. Small planters would undoubtedly love the measure, either to build houses for their families or to flip it as more lucrative real estate. What this proposal does is simply reproduce the disastrous policy decisions that have led us to this pass: first, large sugar companies were allowed by government to divert arable land into real estate that brought higher short-term returns (at the expense of the long-term interest of the country in food production). Then the bigger planters wanted a slice of the action too and we got the RES/PDS developments. In the meantime, land used to grow food shrunk from 8,124 hectares in 2012 to just 7,334 hectares in 2019. Seed production has halved from 4.5 tonnes in 2013 to just 2.2 tonnes in 2019. Why? A combination of bad labour practices and less land being used to produce them. The number of livestock farmers has shrunk as has the number of animals reared in Mauritius (cattle: 6,041 in 2014 to 3,508 in 2018), why? Lack of land to expand livestock production that still takes place in cramped backyards. And now the government wants smaller planters to join in the act too. Food security? Not with this kind of budget.

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