The support will focus on Mozambique's vast tropical savanna, utilizing experiences from a project that has successfully converted Brazil's "cerrado" tropical savanna ecoregion into one of the world's major food-producing areas thanks to cultivar improvement and other agricultural technologies from Japan, they said.

Mozambique's tropical savanna is as wide as 550,000 square kilometers, or 1.4 times larger than Japan's land area, and has soil and weather conditions similar to those of Brazil's cerrado, or "inaccessible," region.

When the United States banned soybean exports in the 1970s, Japan financially and technologically helped Brazil develop the cerrado for agriculture in a bid to stabilize the supply of soybeans. As a result, Brazil has become a major soybean exporter along with the United States.

Under the joint aid program, Brazil will primarily provide Mozambique with agricultural technologies, while Japan will support infrastructure improvements such as building a 350-kilometer trunk road that will cut across the tropical savanna.

Japan signed an agreement with Mozambique on Wednesday to extend up to 5,978 million yen in a low-interest, long-term loan for the infrastructure improvement project.

Mozambique is one of the world's poorest nations, with per capita gross domestic product amounting to $477, due to delays in adoption of advanced foreign technologies and infrastructure improvements for agriculture that involves some 80 percent of its labor force.

The joint Japan-Brazil support program, which will cover such products as soybeans, wheat, tomatoes and pumpkins, will not only improve the productivity of both small- and large-scale farming operations but also introduce foreign capital to processing operations, a Japan International Cooperation Agency official said.