Land as a commodity

Following Karl Marx and others, Polanyi argued that before the rise of the market, land and labour were controlled and managed through persisting social relationships. As the market expanded, land and labour were “disembedded” from their social relations and turned into commodities (^{Polanyi 1944}). ^{Chimhowu and Woodhouse (2006}: 359-360) show that “the commoditisation of access to land within the framework of customary tenure has been evident for more than a century and is now both more common and increasing”.

According to ^{Lastarria-Cornhiel (1997}: 1324): “The major factor behind these changes is the transformation of land from a factor of production to a source of food and as an asset, from an abundant resource valued for its ability to provide income through coconuts to a scarce commodity that has cash value”. ^{Peters (2013}) attributes changes in the meanings given to land elsewhere to the effects of structural adjustment programmes and market liberalisation policies, which led people to look to family and customary land as sources of food and cash.

The commodification of land in Micaúne is not a novelty. Land (or the trees standing on it) has been a commodity since the 1880s when the Portuguese government decided to make land concessions to private interests including private white farmers. This gained a new impetus in the 1960s because of legislative reforms that authorised new land concessions in the Zambezi Delta. These reforms aimed at promoting and establishing Portuguese settlements in the colonies, as an economic strategy to develop its empire by allowing the conversion of what was “indigenous reserve” into private settler holdings.

As a result, in Micaúne, in the 1960s and early 1970s, only six families were occupying an area of 1426 hectares used for livestock (^{Negrão 2001}: 179). By 1973, private farmers controlled approximately 92.158 hectares in Micaúne (Negrão 2001: 174). Due to the discriminatory nature of the colonial laws and the excessive amounts required to purchase land, it was unusual for African families to buy land (^{Zamparoni 1998}). However, through the transaction of palm trees, African families were able to expand their holdings.

Rights over land with palm trees belonged to the occupants and their children, entitling them to the right to reap the rewards at any time. Land transactions happened outside of state control, based on the evaluation of the number of trees, and attached plots. One could not sell land without trees on it (^{Negrão 2001}: 218).

During this period, the sale of land was a complex process and followed certain rules. First, nobody could dispose of his or her entire area of land; second, the sale should be made in the presence of the local chiefs (Mwenes and Samassoas), as witnesses to sanction both a just evaluation and assess the reason for the transaction. Third, there should be a compelling reason for the sale of land and finally, the sale was definitive and led to the loss of all previous rights (^{Negrão 2001}: 217-218). There was also a practice of borrowing land following rules overseen by Mwenes and Samassoas who “could invite the families involved in the transactions to reach an agreement on the land without involving any payment. The tenants were allowed to eat the fruit of the trees but were forbidden to sell them” (Negrão 2001: 214).

One would have expected that the land transactions described above could have been stopped by the post-colonial and socialist government, which proclaimed that all land in Mozambique was a state property and, therefore, it could not be sold, alienated, mortgaged or pledged. But this was not the case since these transactions continued to take place and entered a new phase in the democratic dispensation.

Customary land practices were still strong among the older generation of Micaúne residents at the time of my fieldwork in 2011 and 2012. A case in point is that of Mr Bruno who, after working in Chinde-Sede as a domestic worker in the 1950s and 1960s, later established himself in Micaúne as an independent tailor. He was able to invest in palm trees, including land, and, through the process, he came to own four big plots, which are still in his possession. Excluding the private farmers and traders’ families, he was one of the local people controlling sizable portions of land, according to my informants.

I met Mr Bruno in 2012 at his well-built house, in the company of his wife. They lived alone as their four children are grown up and married, living in their households. Three of the children left Micaúne some time ago; only the last born remained in Micaúne managing his own business. This last son was a successful young entrepreneur as he owned one of the houses left by the colonial traders where he established a shop and ran a workshop for motorbikes. He was also one of the largest holders of livestock.

Mr Bruno spends his days at home while his wife tries to grow vegetables on one of his four plots next to their house. The other plots were scattered around the area and remained idle, as most palm trees are dead. Considering Mr Bruno’s age, one would have expected that his children would have been actively engaged in their father’s holdings, but this is not the case. When asked if his plots were still in his possession, Mr Bruno replied: “Yes but the land has no value because all the palm trees are dead. I can’t sell an empty space”.⁴ Mr Bruno epitomises the old principle of land tenure, which attached the value of land to the trees on it. Until recently, direct land transactions among residents were limited, as the value of land depended primarily on palm trees on it.

The widespread death of palm trees associated with CLYD in the 2000s has led to the reconceptualization of the economic value attributed to land. The lengthy economic association between palm trees and land gave way to a clear separation between them. Land regained a market value and it stands on its right as a means of production. Although the sale of land has been common in the area, it has intensified in recent times. This is evident from the following statement by Mr Lucas, a man in his 40s and a grandson to an important landowner in Micaúne-Sede: “Now that there is no coconut, we must find alternatives. I am capitalising on the land that I inherited from my father to secure a better future for my children”.⁵ By capitalising, the informant meant doing different transactions related to the land such as selling, renting and lending. The informant inherited the patrimony from his father, a Madal employee who worked as a machileiro (porters who transported white people in carrying chairs) and who later become an independent carpenter. Upon his father’s death, Mr Lucas inherited the land, which was comprised of eight plots scattered around Micaúne-Sede. Over the years, he was able to acquire, rent and sell some plots whenever he felt the need.

Mr Lucas is just an example, which encapsulates an approach commonly held by many Micaúne residents in recent times. Despite knowing that it is illegal to sell land, people have claimed that what they were doing was a matter of survival, as evidenced by Mr Lucas. Moreover, these illegal land dealings might also be an expression of subtle resistance and subversion of state laws as most people feel entitled to engage in dealings on the land they have been occupying for generations.

This suggests that residents have decided to take a proactive approach to solve their problem instead of just complaining and waiting for someone else to sort it out. Land is crucial because it is currently the main livelihoods asset of the local people since labour and palm trees have ceased to perform that function. The fact that my informant is a secretary of Mugorre neighbourhood, a position in which he has been active since 2008, gives him an advantage in the management of land and the opportunity to know about prospective sellers and buyers. This is because neighbourhood secretaries are the ones who must endorse to the chiefs all land requests in a certain geographic area.

This was evident in a recent land transaction in which Mr Lucas was involved. The recent electrification of Micaúne in 2012 attracted Movitel, a newly established private mobile operator to the area. The company’s staff visited Micaúne to identify a suitable area for the antenna and they identified a certain plot. According to the local authorities, this plot belonged to Mr Lucas and they advised the company to contact the owner. Movitel staff was able to meet him and close the deal under which he is receiving a monthly payment.

Again, this is an example of how people like Mr Lucas are capitalising (to use his term) their holdings to generate an income. Madal too has been renting out its Mahimba Game Farm to foreign companies and, to date, the management of this farm included American and, recently, South African companies.

Many people are locally renting out land to generate an income. Most of the people involved in renting land for growing food are people who live at the coast of Micaúne, as there is no sufficient fertile land elsewhere. The payment is in cash or goods depending on the financial situation of the household. When it comes to renting land for housing, it is mainly for the public officials who are in the area temporarily for work purposes. As a result, they do not engage in long-term land use and the houses they build are temporary and precariously constructed with sticks, mud, and grass ceilings. As suggested by ^{White (2010}: 513) concerning South Africa, “buildings made with mud and thatch may evoke a sense of insecurity and powerlessness, by contrast to cement buildings which have a claim to permanence”.

Although it is rare, the destruction of a house in a rented plot might happen only in an extreme case when replacing an existing house. Normally, they keep and rent out the provisional house to another person. In the case of a tenant refusing to return the house, the matter may lead to conflicts.

^{Gengenbach (1998}: 32) reported a case of conflict in Magude, southern Mozambique, among female farmers who refused to give up borrowed land, and disputes over the proper location of boundaries between cultivated fields. Those conflicts led to the emergence of Xifula witchcraft as a weapon as those newcomers’ women who borrowed land, in the end, refused to return it and, instead, started to threaten the owners with witchcraft. This led to conflicts between newcomers and locals regarding who does and does not belong to the “cultivating community”.

In this instance, newcomers used witchcraft to redress issues of access to land in the area. Although witchcraft accusations are a common feature in my area of study, they are not associated with conflicts between newcomers and locals over access to resources. Neither are there generalised cases of conflicts associated with the refusal to return borrowed land. However, there is the potential for such conflicts to arise and increase due to the growing demand for land, particularly because the number of newcomers with regular income has been increasing year after year.

Mr Lucas’s story contrasts with Mr Bruno’s and exemplifies the changing attitude towards land influenced by commodification. Although this process might benefit those who own land, in the end, it is likely to lead to alienation of the most valued asset and fuel land-associated conflicts as it is already happening in both urban and rural areas throughout the country. These conflicts are likely to happen at two main levels. On the one end, over boundaries, given that the natural landmarks - palm trees - are no more, and, on the other, as the population grows, land is becoming increasingly unavailable and the residents’ lack of sources of income will put them at an unfavourable position compared to outsiders who mostly earn a regular income. This is already evident in the salience of the distinction between locals and outsiders, as discussed in the next two sections.

Land as a source of identity

Place is considered an important aspect of people’s identity and belonging (^{Ponte 2004}) and the meanings attributed to places are multiple and depend on people’s experiences over time (^{Rodman 1992}). According to ^{Giddens (1984}, as quoted in ^{De Haan and Zoomers 2003}: 351), a particular locale provides resources and knowledge on which actors can base their action and at the same time it constrains human actions because it binds them to the resources and knowledge provided.

In recent years, land and belonging have featured in the writings that focus on the dichotomy between locals and outsiders, perceived as a source of people’s exclusion from participating in politics and the economy (^{Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000}; Geschiere 2005, ²⁰⁰⁹; ^{Lentz 2007}). Moreover, the prominence of land, graves, old homes and other landscapes has been a crucial element in the construction and negotiation of belonging by communities (^{Mujere 2010}: 497; see also ^{Shipton 2009}).

My research resonates with this literature in as much as the claim of belonging associated with burial sites is concerned. In Micaúne, the dichotomy between locals and outsiders is epitomised and reproduced in every burial event. People have been using their attachment to their ancestors buried in the area as one of the main reasons to claim control over the land. As one informant pointed out: “Land does not only have an economic value as a means of production and housing; it has a more profound meaning because it is the home of our ancestors”.⁶

^{Ingold (2000}), like other anthropologists, argues that being indigenous assumes that the indigenous or natives are the descendants of those who inhabited a country when colonists arrived from elsewhere. As a result, inhabiting that land is an attribute of an indigenous identity passed on through descendency. This is contradictory because it implies that one’s identity depends on his/her genealogical ancestors and not on the attachment to the land.

It is in this genealogical ancestors’ sense that Micaúne residents claim their attachment to the land, which suggests that kinship is a crucial element for the understanding of land relations in Micaúne. In this context, my ethnographic material also highlights that land holds a far more key role as an identity marker by establishing linkage to the ancestors as shown by Mr Faquir’s mother example. Mr Faquir, who at the time was the head of the association of traditional healers, feeling powerless to help his mother when she got seriously ill, decided with his siblings that their mother had to go to Quelimane, the capital city of the province. They felt that she could enjoy not only good medical care but also much better nutritional support. The woman refused to leave the area, claiming that she wanted to stay closer to her father’s grave, and she ended up dying there in 2000. Mr Faquir himself has no plans to leave Micaúne despite complaints about the harsh economic conditions. He claims that he must continue living in Micaúne to take care of both parents’ graves.

The claim about people’s attachment to land is also applied to people who are away. Locally, people argue that every son of the soil when back from wherever he/she had gone, whether dead or alive, must come to the family place to stay or rest. For this reason, all local families maintain a graveyard inside their plots. These graveyards caught my attention because the tombstones contained several crosses on top of them and I was told that they symbolise the number of people buried there, going back to the founder of the family.

According to one informant, Mr Silva: “Whenever a family member dies away from home, he is symbolically buried in his family’s graveyard”. This practice is undertaken to reduce the excessive costs of relocating corpses of those who have died elsewhere back to Micaúne. While the symbolic burials happen in other parts of the country, the difference here is that even though each deceased person is entitled to his or her own grave, because of the scarcity of land, there is only a single grave, which entails adding a cross for each deceased person. Another striking aspect was the quality of and investment in the graves. Due to people’s tough economic situations, one would have expected to see graves built using simple local materials, which are not costly. On the contrary, cemented and painted graves are part of the local landscape, in stark contrast to the shacks where many people live.

Cementing and painting the graves might symbolically mean that Micaúne residents give immense importance to death. The graveyard symbolises their definitive home as opposed to the shacks where they live, regarded as temporary. As another informant, Mr Sousa, indicated “we dignify the dead by giving them decent burials and marble graves”.⁷ This seems to be a widespread practice among the people who inhabit the lower Zambézia, which includes all the districts south of Quelimane, namely, Quelimane, Inhassunge and Chinde as I had the opportunity to observe during trips in these places.

There is a belief that the ancestors protect their descendants through special powers. Such belief in the power of ancestors was evident during the electrification of Micaúne in 2012. It appears that several years ago Micaúne had never had public electricity supplied and depended on a group of generators, which supplied the village with electricity from 5 pm to 9 pm every day. Although the government has been undertaking a project of rural electrification across the entire country since the country’s independence in 1975, electricity reached Micaúne only in 2012. Chinde was the last of the 17 districts of Zambézia province to join the national grid.

The implementation of the electrification project in Micaúne happened via the district of Inhassunge and faced problems, which delayed the conclusion of the project. Apart from the rains, the technical team faced challenges when cutting down trees, some of which were located inside family cemeteries. The government, in coordination with the company assigned to do the job, undertook the establishment of the route of the electric cables excluding local families from the process. The government ordered the company to initiate the cutting of trees and the drilling of holes to sustain the posts, but they were able to cut down only a few trees.

The felling of trees took several months and, as I came to learn later, the problem was associated with a lack of proper consultation with the ancestors of those who owned the areas affected by the project. There was a rumour, which indicated that every time the technicians tried to cut down the trees, they saw blood coming out of the trunks. There was a belief that the trees had grown in a chief’s cemetery and to overcome this problem it was necessary to perform a traditional ceremony to appease the ancestors.

Eventually, two months later, the ceremony was performed, which allowed the continuation of the project and it was finalised at the end of 2012. This is an example of how local people perceive their ancestors as their guardians and protectors. Therefore, any initiative on the land must have the endorsement of the ancestors to ensure success, while failing to do so might compromise or affect the likelihood of success.

Thus, burial practices make a clear distinction between locals and outsiders. As a result, every funeral reproduces and symbolises this distinction. Only the locals are entitled to having family graveyards. Newcomers do not build graveyards in the area they inhabit because the land does not belong to their ancestors. Sometimes, this distinction emerges in arguments on which natives ask newcomers: “Who are you? Do you have a graveyard?”. This is a clear indication showing that newcomers do not belong there.

When the newcomers are unable to send back home the deceased body of their kin, at times due to financial reasons, then, the state’s local cemetery becomes an option. However, when newcomers have developed a good relationship, whether friendship or fictive kinship, with a local family, they are, as an exception, allowed to bury their deceased locally, being considered to be something akin to members of the local family in question. There is an exception when the newcomers (mainly public officials) have no friendship or fictive kinship. In such cases, according to Mr Sousa, the newcomer family requests to bury their loved one in a certain local family’s cemetery and, when accepted, payment is required.

The payment covers expenses related to the performance of a ceremony to the local ancestors, as well as for the funeral. However, the burial of the newcomer never happens in the best part of the graveyard, which is under a big tree destined to the owners of the land. In a situation where relatives want to visit the grave of their deceased kin, often they are accompanied by the owners of the cemetery. This suggests that the integration of newcomers is neither immediate nor full. It is a lengthy process and with time, their attachment might grant them the status of natives/locals.

This is the historical process of the incorporation of newcomers into the community. Looking at my case study and considering that there was intense recruitment of labour both by the colonial government and by private companies such as Madal, a considerable number of people who live in Micaúne came from elsewhere. For most of the newcomers, it has been a gradual process of integration. Even the history of the population inhabiting the area shows that the Mahindo are a product of both c-Sena and e-Chuabo ethnic groups. ^{Isaacman and Isaacman (1977}: 109) argued that through the fiction of the first arrival the Sena royal lineage in each chieftaincy was successful at attracting and supporting a large following using excess agricultural produce as bridewealth, or chuma, trading slaves with neighbouring ethnic groups, through voluntary enslavement and pawning, and kidnapping.

In brief, family cemeteries reify the construction of otherness and indicate how residents subvert and challenge the notion of the local community as defined in the 1997 land law and other government instruments. According to the land law, communities are defined as “a grouping of families and individuals, living in a circumscribed territorial area at the level of a locality or below, which has as its objective the safeguarding of common interests through the protection of areas of habitation and agriculture, whether cultivated or in fallow, forests, sites of socio-cultural importance, grazing lands, water sources and areas for expansion” (Law nº 19/97, article 1/1).

This suggests that newcomers, although legally recognised as members of the local community, are excluded from land rights by the locals on the argument that this is not their ancestral land. It can be argued that it is through this that land-based identity is sanctioned: by excluding the newcomers at the same time it is used as an entitlement to existing resources, as will be explored in the next section.

Land as the reserve of wealth

When analysing the establishment and development of the coconut economy of Micaúne over the past hundred years, I see a shift from a model of wealth in people and things (^{Miers and Kopytoff 1977}; ^{Guyer 1995}), which was consistent with the colonial project of controlling both labour and land, into a triangular force model of wealth existing in-between claims from the market, from commoning and from the state (^{Rakopoulos and Rio 2018}: 285). One of the main characteristics of wealth in this late model is its ability to “uphold a trans-temporal function by holding value in store for the future… in-between claims from the market, from commoning and from the state” (Rakopoulos and Rio 2018: 281-285).

In the case of Mozambique, the recent discovery and promise of wealth from minerals have led Micaúne residents to turn into the land as a store of their wealth. This is reinforced by the Mozambican government approval of specific and attractive legislation on minerals, which has an impact on land use. According to the law, “land use for mining operations shall have priority over other land uses whenever economic and social benefits related to these operations are higher” (Law nº 14/2002, article 43, n.º 2).

The way the law is framed leaves no doubt about the supreme value of minerals extraction as compared to any other land use. This, on its own, contributes to people living in areas with minerals to have high expectations about their future. As with local inhabitants and Madal, the government, too, is betting on the idea of anticipation by prioritising any investment in mining extraction. With the anticipated revenues from mineral resources, the government envisaged reducing its dependence on foreign aid, which finances approximately 50% of the state budget.

This government discourse is likely to contribute to land grabbing given the fact that laws and incentives are attracting high numbers of companies to make investments in natural resources. Nevertheless, one of the effects of this government discourse is the instillment of hope in many communities, especially those living at the sites where the minerals are located. For instance, Micaúne residents believe that similar mining developments might occur in their area given its richness in natural resources. There is a strong local belief that there is oil in the Micaúne subsoil following the American company Gulf Oil which undertook oil-prospecting activities in Muguaia in the 1960s and the recent (as from 2000) (re)discovery of huge reserves of minerals as well as the respective extraction. ^{Campbell (2013}) notes that Mozambique is currently producing beryl, ilmenite, tantalum, zircon, aluminium, natural gas, heavy sands, coal, lime, phosphate, diatomite and other minerals. By 2013, Mozambique’s share of global tantalum production was some 16%, ilmenite around 6%, zircon about 3% and beryl 1%.

The boom of mineral resources extraction in the country revived the prospects of the Muguaia oil project and the possibility of an alternative and secure source of livelihoods for Micaúne residents. There have been several attempts to determine the viability of oil extraction in Muguaia. In 2005, Petrona, an Italian company, commissioned a public consultation to assess the environmental impact and economic viability of possible oil exploitation in Muguaia, but the study was not conclusive (^{Achar 2010}). Five years later, in May 2010, in a historic visit by a president of the Republic of Mozambique to Micaúne, the people made it clear that there was oil in Muguaia and that the government had to facilitate the process of its extraction. During a public rally in the course of the same visit, an old Micaúne resident stood up and said: “Mr President, as our palm trees are dying, we request the Government to speed up the mechanisms for the exploitation of that oil deposit; without palm trees, we have no life, so we are please asking you to look for that oil”.

The president responded that the amount of oil was too little and there were no companies yet interested in exploiting the existing oil.⁸ Despite the president’s negative response, the rumours about oil in Micaúne have not stopped. In 2013, in an interview on the largest and most circulated public newspaper in Mozambique, the provincial director for environmental affairs had to explain that there was no oil in Micaúne.⁹

In 2017, the government of Mozambique through the National Petroleum Institute (INP) contracted the French company Compagnie Générale Geophisic (CGG) to undertake geophysical and geological studies at the maritime bloc of the Zambezi Delta.¹⁰ One cannot help but deny that there are no natural resources on the subsoil when there is continued research in the area.

These expectations are creating hope that eventually the Muguaia project will have a successful implementation. This is premised on the expectation that all potential investors, if any, will behave in the same or a better way than Madal, providing not only employment but providing several services in the area. Nevertheless, there are abundant examples across Africa that show that this is not always the case.

In the case of Mozambique, different large-scale projects show that the living conditions of the people in these areas remain precarious (^{Mosca and Selemane 2011}; ^{CIP 2014}). Nevertheless, Micaúne residents believe that it is worth trying rather than just sitting and waiting for change (development) to come. Therefore, Micaúne residents have not stopped demanding that the government concretise this project.

Many people, especially the adults and elderly, believe that the granting of the right to extract oil in that area to a private company could solve their livelihood problems. The locals are pushing for the replacement of a monoculture with another potential resource curse in the expectation that everything will be well by just rotating the centre of economic gravity from coconut to oil or other mineral resources.

Apart from oil, there is a belief that Micaúne hosts other minerals, which have been attracting national and foreign investors. A 2012 government mining cadastre shows that the coastal area of Micaúne was under an intense concession for mining prospection, particularly heavy sands, which can be used in ceramics, paints, plastics, paper, aerospace and defence industries, just to mention a few. The staff from the provincial directorate of environmental affairs verbally confirmed this by indicating that the rights to all coastal areas had been granted to investors for mineral prospecting studies.¹¹ For instance, in 2007, the government granted a prospecting licence for five years to the Mozambique Natural Resources Corporation LTD in an area of 15.240 hectares. In 2010, a prospecting licence was granted to the Chinese-owned Mozambique Heavysand Mining Company LTD for an area of 16.440 hectares with the license expiring in 2016 (^{CIP 2012}).

The Chinese company Hong Ti Minerals LTD got a prospecting license for titanium in Micaúne in 2011. A year later, in 2012, a prospecting license for ilmenite, rutile and zircon was granted to another Chinese company, Africa Great Wall Mining Development Company, to explore heavy mineral sands in the Chinde (particularly Micaúne), Inhassunge and Nicoadala districts of Zambézia Province.

In 2013 alone, there were three five-year prospecting licenses approved for Micaúne, namely, Di Yuan Minerals LTD from China for ilmenite, rutile and zircon; Cronus Minerals LTD, with Mozambican capital; and Mozambique Heavysand Mining Company LTD.¹² As indicated above, most of these investments were still in the prospection phase and, if they materialise in the next few years, they will provide many jobs for the local people and probably will represent an increased investment in infrastructure.

Through the interest manifested by private investors, Micaúne is back on the map and is gradually becoming an investment destination in terms of mineral resources. This might suggest that this area, in years to come, might experience private investments such as those in coal in Tete province. Residents are increasingly becoming aware of the interest of mining companies in future mineral prospecting activity in the area. It is, therefore, not surprising that people hope that their socio-economic conditions are going to change for the better.

To a considerable degree, this explains why Micaúne residents have not migrated for better living conditions elsewhere. Indeed, migration to cities is not an option either given the difficulties for one to establish him/her there, which requires different kinds of skills and assets. Most Micaúne residents can hardly get formal employment in cities because they lack relevant qualifications as well as capital to invest in businesses or acquire land, which are the two most important sources of livelihoods in Mozambican cities.

The implications of such a high demand for land for mineral extraction in Micaúne remain unknown, as the successful implementation of the mines will require the resettlement of residents. Considering the current scarcity of land in the area, there will be an escalation of land conflicts. Indeed, a conflict has arisen recently opposing the Africa Great Wall Mining Development Company and the residents in Deia (Chinde). The latter have been accusing the company of undermining their access to drinking water and land for subsistence crops (^{Ossumane 2018}).

From the discussion above, another concept of land emerged. People consider land as a collective asset, which belongs to, or, at least, should benefit, the local people. This approach expands on the previous concept (land as a source of identity) and differs from the first one (land as a commodity) because of its individual or private focus. Not one of my research participants saw subsoil wealth as belonging to a particular individual, but rather they saw it as the wealth of the Micaúne natives. Somehow, residents feel entitled to the wealth of the soil and have confidence in a renewed cycle of economic stability.