The Sunday Mail
Hon VP Emmerson Mnangagwa
This is the second part of Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s lecture titled “Command Agriculture in Zimbabwe: Myths, Lessons and Future”, delivered at Midlands State University on May 10, 2017.
Government is committed to ensuring that all contracted grain is transported to the Grain Marketing Board. To that end, it is incumbent upon every farmer to get the crop out of the field in good condition. Secondly, the road networks need a re-surfacing blitz to make them passable. It is also vital that we capacitate our farmers by providing them with reliable vehicles to transport the grain, while a good rail network should also be handy in assisting with bulk grain transportation.
Turning to the issue of storage, our emphasis should be on avoiding post-harvest losses. Going forward, we need to sustain the momentum we gathered in paying our farmers early during the 2015/2016 agricultural season. We also need to pay logistics service providers like transporters timeously. Likewise, it is critical to make provision for the payment of grain bags in which to pack and transport the grain to the GMB.
To that end, Government’s concern and interest is that all who have provided services must be paid on time. Going forward, it is necessary to have a cropping calendar which will provide guidance in the following areas: Supply of raw materials for the manufacture or processing of inputs such as fertilisers, lime and seed; Co-ordinated soil-testing; Access to inputs; Ploughing, disking and harrowing; Application of herbicides; Co-ordinated harvesting; Timely collection of harvested maize and other farm produce from collection points and drying of the maize to free fields for winter wheat or barley; and Land preparation for the winter crop, or any other crops falling in the same season.
The calendar should be communicated to all stakeholders, including tillage service providers, as well as lime, seed and fertiliser suppliers. For optimal success, I exhort all farmers under the programme, inclusive of those on other programmes, to conduct soil tests on their farms, before they start tilling their land so that they know the type and precise quantities of fertiliser blends to apply.
Poor soils, or those with out-of–specification pH values, or nutrient balance, inhibit successful food production. In the same way that all illnesses cannot be treated with the same medicine, our diverse soils need unique nutrient combinations.
As such, each soil type has its own nutrient composition and management needs. I believe that an opportunity exists for the adoption of ICTs for quick soil tests and nutrient-mapping as the process of taking samples to laboratories tends to be long, affecting the carrying out of other key farming operations. For best results, besides use of lime and fertiliser blends as detected by soil test results, farmers also need to continue to use improved crop varieties, carry out timely weeding and timely treatment of crops for pests and disease.
Our economy is largely agro-based, with studies having shown that the country’s economic growth is directly linked to the performance of its agricultural sector, and that its poor performance due to extreme weather patterns like El Nino and the increasingly acidic soils, has left many rural households malnourished and in extreme poverty. Maize accounts for up to 70 percent of the population’s dietary needs and is also beneficiated into such products as starch, grits, and glucose in various agro-processing value chains.
Maize derivatives such as cooking oil and stock feed are also being exported to earn the country foreign currency. For this reason, enhancing crop yield boosts farmer incomes, increases the country’s economic development and guarantees food security. As I speak now, shipment of centre pivots from Spain has begun.
On a related note, the Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development Authority has been set up to ensure rapid revitalisation of irrigation infrastructure development. At a more general level, I want to challenge the sub-sector to invest in mechanisation and irrigation development, albeit on a small scale level.
This is especially so for smallholder farmers. Enhancing technical support as well as research and development for smallholder farmers will go a long way in sustaining agricultural productivity. Government is currently conducting countrywide de-silting activities under the auspices of the Emergency Drought Mitigation Programme mostly in rural areas; a programme aimed at restoring the holding capacity of dams and weirs.
The National De-silting Programme is part of a broad array of measures that are meant to address drought-related challenges such as irrigation water shortages, and water for livestock and domestic use, among other applications. The siltation is largely a result of poor agricultural practices and gold panning along rivers, overgrazing, gully erosion, and stream bank cultivation.
We, therefore, need to put up structures such as silt traps or barriers which stop much of the sand and silt from getting into the water bodies. We also need to stabilise river banks and slopes which are highly susceptible. This dovetails with the Sadc Water Strategy and the Sadc Industrialisation Strategy. Agro-meteorology is important as it allows for proper agricultural planning, including the timing of critical farm operations, the amount of inputs to be used and general farm productivity.
It also can be viewed as the panacea to weather sensitive challenges occasioned by floods and droughts. In this regard, it is important that such information be timeously received and communicated to stakeholders if farm productivity is to be increased and disasters averted. It is thus important that the Meteorological Services Department issues accurate, timely and, therefore, dependable weather forecasts and advice to farmers so that communities are forewarned of impending droughts, if any, or other serious climatic conditions.
Government is already going beyond rain-fed agriculture by making optimal use of available dams, weirs and water reservoirs for irrigation to boost our maize, wheat, tobacco, cotton and small grains yields, among other crops, in order to achieve and broaden the range of crops under Zim-Asset. A key overarching input for economic development and industrialisation is research and development across all sectors.
On the whole, I envisage a broad role for Research and Development in agro-industry, including in seed development, beef, dairy, poultry, piggery, goats and sheep, and small ruminants.
R&D also needs to incorporate crop science and diseases, fisheries, and horticulture, among others. To that end, the setting up of more research-led universities such as Midlands State University, Chinhoyi University of Technology, National University of Science and Technology and Bindura University of Science Education, Great Zimbabwe University and Lupane State University, among others, coupled with agricultural research stations like the Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre is a deliberate Government effort aimed at empowering the nation in all agricultural sectors.
As Government, therefore, we see the role of such national strategic institutions going beyond the mere production of human capital and, more importantly, producing scientific solutions that answer to our problems.
