The Sunday Mail
Johnson Siamachira
Small-scale farmers drive Zimbabwe’s agricultural economy, which in turn drives the country’s growth as more than half of its 12,5 million people depend on some form of farming for their livelihood. But there are a range of diverse and complex challenges facing today’s smallholder farmers.
One of smallholder farmers’ major impediments to commercial farming is lack of access to reliable and productive markets. Local rural markets are small, and trading in distant urban markets is not profitable due to high transportation costs.
Smallholder farmers also face challenges in gaining access to credit, high-quality inputs, improved technology, information on good agricultural practices, and business development services.
Climate change is also impacting farming communities across Zimbabwe in many ways. At the same time, international food markets are increasingly sophisticated and marked by constantly evolving trends.
There are also higher fuel and input prices. In many farming communities, there are challenges of limited access to technologies and markets due to poor physical infrastructure, storage and transportation services.
The biggest challenge, however, is that smallholder farmers are considered a credit risk by governments, the private sector and donor agencies. However, smallholders can play a significant role in the growth of agricultural industries which often face severe challenges in accessing adequate and reliable supplies of high-quality raw materials.
For smallholder farmers to participate meaningfully in agriculture, they need training and technology transfer that can serve to boost production and allow them to be genuine stakeholders in productive value chains.
As opposed to merely improving production, training and technology, Government should empower smallholder farmers to meet the product specifications of markets.
For example, crop production should follow systems that meet requirements for variety, size, weight, colouration, and maturity, among other issues.
Improvements in post-harvest handling across the agricultural value chain are also critical to meeting the demands of lucrative markets.
As climate change is expected to affect agricultural production over the long term, there is a great need to integrate smallholder commercialisation with climate change mitigation and adaptation.
To do this, farmers should apply good agricultural practices and technologies that improve resilience and reduce degradation at the farm level.
Examples are soil and water conservation, low-cost irrigation systems, integrated pest and disease management, range land management, as well as other good agricultural practices such as raised beds and drainage canals to reduce flood damage and maintain healthy soil, or grassy mulch to preserve moisture, suppress weed growth and support healthy soils.
The Zimbabwe Agricultural Income and Employment Development programme has developed a technical assistance approach that adapts commercial-scale practices and technologies to the smallholder setting in a sustainable manner that also promotes adaptation to climate change.
Zim-AIED was initiated in 2010 to raise incomes and food security for 125 000 rural households through increased agriculture production and commercialisation.
This integrated approach to crop and livestock management has been successfully adapted and refined across Zimbabwe and, as a result, Zim-AIED’s program has managed to integrate thousands of smallholders into commercial supply chains with private agribusinesses serving both domestic and international markets.
But this endeavor is only gratifying if it is sustainable and the program has proven time and again that farmers who continue to apply good agricultural practices and treat their farms as businesses never return to subsistence farming.
Johnson Siamachira is a Development Communications Specialist
