As the helicopter alights on a patch of grass on the outskirts of the small village, capsule a group of about fifteen excited children surge forward waving their hands and shouting out “Bom Dia!”  - Welcome in Portuguese. A few hundred yards away in the main square, purchase a crowd of people is standing outside a warehouse near which a man is weighing sacks of maize. Some of the villagers are carrying buckets of maize on their heads; others have procured gunnysacks and have them on their backs held up by cord tied around their head. Hundreds of these sacks are stacked up in a pile.  A handful of young men are loading the maize onto an open-backed truck.

“We just found out how much our competitors are offering for the kilo,” says company buying manager Dirk du Plessis, clutching a briefcase full of Meticais (the national currency), “we’re going to up that by a sixth. Farmers always come to DECA first, they know we weigh and pay for each contribution on the spot, no matter how small”

In under half an hour the transaction has been completed and the tiny red chopper is roaring off to the next remote buying point where the scene is set to repeat itself once more.

At the time of decolonisation, during the 1960s, Africa was capable of feeding itself. Over the next few decades however, the continent became increasingly dependent on food imports as, mired by war disease and corruption, many of its countries began to struggle to produce sufficient amounts of crops to feed burgeoning populations. In 2008, a World Bank Report indicated that far from improving, the situation had gotten much worse, with data showing that over the past two decades the number of poor in Africa has doubled from 150 million to 300 million.

At 51, Zimbabwean-born Euan Kay cuts an imposing figure: his bushy white beard and the deep wrinkles on his weathered face tell of a man who has lived through many days under the hot African sun. He has been the director of DECA since it was launched in the town of Chimoio, in western Mozambique, in 2005. DECA is a maize processing plant that was constructed with the notion that it is more practical to source maize directly from subsistence farmers than to invest in intensive agriculture.

Recalling how the company got started, Kay explains that one of the company’s founders, a young Zimbabwean entrepreneur, “was driving through Mozambique one day when he saw all this maize lying on the side of the road. He instantly realised that the production existed but that there simply was no market to sell it on.”

Rural Mozambique has struggled to recover from the civil war that ended in 1992. Ten years after the first multi-party elections in 1994, the western part of the country still had no economy to speak of: there was little infrastructure, its wildlife had all been killed off during the war and the farming community was disaggregated and still struggling to get back on its feet.

When the plant was first built, four silos were estimated as enough to store the maize before it was processed into the corn flour that would be sold on a domestic market. Four years on there are seventeen silos and seven warehouses all of them overflowing with produce. At the time of its inception no one could have predicted what a huge success the project would be.

“Individual production has more than trebled,” says Kay, “Whereas a couple of years ago a family used to cultivate no more than a hectare of land, they’ve now doubled that, they’ve moved from subsistence to commercial. We have begun to see the results too: with the money they are making, people are beginning to invest in better housing and in sending their children to school.”

DECA enjoys official endorsement by the Mozambican government. The president attended its official inauguration in 2007 and DECA t-shirts can sometimes be spotted in the streets of the coastal city of Beira, over a hundred miles to the east of Chimoio. They have just opened a new plant further up north, near the town of Tete, which is set to take off in May 2009.

Does this system not contrast with the World Bank suggestions that focus on the establishment of intensive agriculture and propose to use international aid to kick-start large-scale agricultural development in Africa?

Farming in Africa has traditionally not been large-scale and it is only in the mainly white communities of Kenya, South Africa and previously Zimbabwe that commercial agriculture has had any success. In the current situation however, for any agricultural model to work, it needs to focus on what actually happens instead of trying to force western systems on a reluctant population.

Is it possible that a capitalist scheme, the ultimate purpose of which is not to feed the hungry but to make money for it’s investors, could provide a solution to the agricultural crisis?

Mike Pelham, the non-executive director of a new company called Agriterra, thinks it does: “We are providing an incentive for people to broaden their horizons. They can do it on their own terms and in a way that most suits their needs. By focussing on domestic production we are ensuring that people cater for themselves first.”

Agriterra is a fledgling umbrella company that aims to launch agricultural schemes in sub Saharan Africa geared towards creating food for domestic consumption. Given the success of DECA, investors began to look into expanding the model to cover different crops. The scheme is set to take off in South Sudan, a country still crippled by the effects of a civil war that lasted 22 years and which came to a tentative end in 2005.

Projects geared towards making money seem to have a better chance of success than large-scale governmental or donor-funded development schemes. A reason for this might be that investors have more to lose and are less susceptible to corruption or the inefficient bureaucracy that slows down so many UN sponsored projects.

Kay definitely feels that the model can become part of a solution to the problem of bringing production levels up in order to feed local populations. He is, however, concerned about sustainability: “We must be aware of the environmental aspects,” he says, “traditionally in this part of the world, people use a practice known as slash and burn, an agricultural method that involves burning large swathes of land to clear it up for crops. As local communities decide to up the ante we are going to see more and more forests cut back. At DECA we have already begun to provide agronomy support to sensitise people about these issues.”

Both Agriterra and DECA are looking into selling seeds at subsidised prices to groups that they have identified as practicing good agricultural husbandry. It is in their interest to see that the farmers do well, but also to see that they act in a sustainable fashion. Neither company is based on lofty humanitarian ideals about saving Africa. A move like giving away seeds is not conceived as an act of charity but one motivated by a basic self-interest.

Judging by the expressions on the faces of the Mozambican farmers who are coming to sell their produce, they do not feel they are being short-changed. A little selfishly motivated capitalist investment has gone a long way towards making their lives slightly more bearable.