A Globalização, a Eficiência, e Károly Polanyi

, ou "no dos outros é refresco."

Direto de Moçambique, onde os portugueses (como os ingleses na Índia ou os belgas nos Grandes Lagos) criaram, deliberadamente, as bases de conflitos pós-coloniais :


Maputo citizens, mostly women, who make their living by selling live chickens fear that they will have to give the business up because they are unable to compete with the cheap Brazilian frozen chickens dumped on the Mozambican market.

Up until a few months ago, the cheapest way of obtaining meat was to buy a live chicken, then slaughter and pluck it at home. Not any more.

The Maputo daily paper "Noticias" sent reporters to four Maputo markets where they found live Mozambican chickens selling for between 70,000 and 80,000 meticais each (at current exchange rates there are about 24,000 meticais to the US dollars).

But the Brazilian frozen chickens cost between 45,000 and 65,000 meticais, depending on weight. 46 year old Joana Matsinhe, who has been selling live chickens in the Xipamanine market, the largest in the city, since 1994, told "Noticias" that her sales have been in decline since December, when the Brazilian poultry began to arrive on a large scale.

"I can't stop selling from one day to the next because I have no other source of income", she said. "We're in a bad way.

We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow".

Rute Salomao, who sells birds in the Mahlhazine market, said that sometimes she sits at her stall all day without selling a single chicken. A good day is when she sells just two or three birds. Two widows, Luisa and Joana Joao, are part of the informal economy - they told the paper they sell chickens on the streets of Jardim neighbourhood. Last year they would buy 100 or 200 chickens at a time from the wholesaler, the General Union of Cooperatives (UGC), and would sell them all in "less than four days".

Now they buy 100 chickens from the UGC and it takes them two or three weeks to sell them. So they have to buy chicken feed to keep the birds alive - and even so some of them perish since the two women do not have proper facilities for keeping live birds for any length of time "Where can I find the money to meet these losses?", asked Luisa Joao.

To make matters worse, the Municipal Police is currently cracking down on illegal street vendors. The City Council wants all vendors to sell in the municipal markets, where there are several thousand unoccupied stalls. But the two widows claim they would sell even less in the markets (they would also, of course, have to pay market fees).