Given that agriculture is a key economic activity of the majority of people living in rural Africa, agricultural development is at the top of the agenda of African leaders. Intensification of agriculture is considered an entry point to improve food security and income generation in sub-Saharan African (SSA). We used a farm optimization model to perform ex-ante assessment of scenarios that could improve gross margin, a farmer's objective, and maize sales, a national policy objective to improve food security, of large and small farms in maize-based farming systems in two posts representative of rural Mozambique (Dombe and Zembe Administrative Posts in Central Province). For selling maize, farmers first had to be maize self-sufficient. We explored two options for increasing agricultural productivity: (i) extensification, to expand the current cultivated area; and (ii) intensification, to increase input use per unit of land. We considered two scenarios for each of the two options.
