The Sunday News
The spectre of drought looms large over Southern Africa and experts have warned of serious food deficits that have seen even some of our neighbours importing maize to augment their domestic production. The Government has already indicated that it was assessing the crop situation at a time when most of the Southern African region was faced with a poor rainfall season. The situation in the country has driven many farmers into despair with mostly the southern parts of the country experiencing serious crop failure.
“The crop situation is not only in Zimbabwe, it’s devastating in the whole of southern Africa. As we speak South Africa is importing 1,7 million metric tonnes of maize because of crop failure and as Sadc bloc, we’re going to look at the crop establishment and work out what the region is likely to harvest,” said Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development Minister, Dr Joseph Made.
He was addressing the African Seed Trade Association 2015 congress in Victoria Falls on Friday. We hear in some parts of the country, up to 75 percent of the crop has been written off and the Government has since moved to allow players in the milling industry to import maize to avert food shortages. However, this is a response to an emergency hence the need for the country to have longer term plans to deal with weather swings that some have linked to climate change.
We believe the country has been found wanting in terms of developing its irrigation potential to optimum levels though calls have been made over the years for better water harvesting techniques to aid in irrigation development. We have not crafted strategies to adapt to the changes in rainfall patterns so that we are not always at the mercy of unfavourable weather. Though there is still hope for the late crop due to intermittent showers around the country, Dr Made conceded that there was a need to capacitate irrigation facilities.
Even President Mugabe has attributed perennial drought and persistent hunger that has hit the country, particularly the southern region, since the turn of the new millennium to the country’s failure to employ mitigating strategies such as water harvesting through the construction of dams.
We report elsewhere in this edition that the President said the country was still lagging behind in terms of water harvesting and there was a need for Government to employ such strategies as a partial fulfilment of the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (ZimAsset) blueprint.
The persistent droughts have become a cause for concern hence the need to be proactive and devise strategies to fight hunger. We share the President’s view on that and challenge planners to go beyond reminding us of the importance of irrigation development each time there is crop failure instead of exploiting that irrigation potential so that when there is a poor rainfall season, they remind us of their readiness by announcing good harvests at irrigation schemes in spite of the poor rains.
“In other countries, they have ways of harvesting and conserving water so that when they experience dry spells, they irrigate their crops so that they won’t be affected. We are still lagging behind on that. We need to start constructing more dams so that we harvest water and be able to irrigate during the dry spell so that when the rains come, they will find our crops in good condition.
“We want to ensure food security at household level and also start looking at having irrigation for smallholder farmers so that we avert hunger,” the President said.
As we deal with the unfolding emergency of food shortages, the Government should redouble efforts to boost our irrigation potential, starting with the small irrigation schemes dotted around the country that are not operating due to a lack of equipment and rehabilitation of the schemes. We are confident that such schemes could produce enough to feed districts and provinces with the bigger ones contributing towards the strategic grain reserves.
We need targets and time lines to achieve that so that we experience ZimAsset in operation. Food security is key and it is our hope that our agricultural experts are spending sleepless nights planning on how to beat the effects of drought and produce enough for our needs. Our farmers have had their fair share of sleepless nights and they are looking up to the experts to provide not only drought resistant seed but also other solutions such as water harvesting and irrigation.
