Let's boost our grain reserves

It is quite startling that our grain reserves have a deficit of 382 000 tonnes of maize. The general manager of the Grain Marketing Board revealed this sad news to parliament recently. He said the Strategic Grain Reserve has 118 000 tonnes of maize against the normal volume of 500 000. It is frightening indeed!

What it means for government is a call for an urgent shift of priority. The greater chunk of government effort must be directed towards availing the staple crop for the nation. The Minister of Finance, Cde Patrick Chinamasa must avail funds to GMB to enable it to pay farmers for the grains they sold to the later. Although the price being offered by GMB is comparatively quite handsome, the period taken to get payment is very discouraging. Most of the farmers went into 2014-2015 farming season without receiving their payments for the grains from the previous season.

The delay in payment has pushed most of the farmers to sell their grain to private buyers who have ready cash. However, the price is not enough to recover costs of inputs and production in general. Therefore, the farmers are being short-changed by private buyers due to the delay of payment by GMB. Nonetheless, most of the farmers view private buyers as a better devil than GMB whose lucrative prices remains a pie in the sky.

Resourcing GMB should be uppermost in the government priority list. This is more so if we are to achieve the goals in the food security cluster of the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset). I understand government is already procuring maize from neighbouring countries such as Zambia. This is a laudable undertaking.

However, government should put in places some systems that will avoid such reactionary measures. Zimbabwe was once the breadbasket of the region and it has the potential to restore that status, provided there is a political goodwill. Our agriculture sector can be resuscitated and that recovery can subsequently boost economic growth. Zimbabwe was an agro-based economy before the biting illegal sanctions were imposed on it.

Since the climatic conditions are no longer favourable, irrigation is the way to go. Government must increase irrigation projects in the country. To begin with, the Agricultural and Rural Development Authority (ARDA) must be invigorated. The authority must work again and on its own, it can indubitably meet half of the national food requirement. A mechanisation project such as the recent one sourced from Brazil, must be dedicated to ARDA.

Small-scale farmers must be assisted to get funding from financial institutions to start irrigation projects. It is a fact that communal and A1 farmers used to supply the bigger chunk of grains to GMB. It will be a big incentive for these farmers if government recognise their contribution in this way.

Government must also make it mandatory for every farmer to grow a certain percentage of food crops on their farms. That percentage must be remitted to the national grain reserves. Most farmers are now growing cash crops such as tobacco even in regions that are not favourable for this crop. As a result, not much of these cash crops come out of these farms.

The land audit is long overdue and it has become one of the many talk shows we have witnessed. There are people who own land just for prestige. Many people have demonstrated that they are not farmers but they still hold on to vast pieces of land. Some farms were last tilted more than five years ago.
Government must be very firm on this one if we are to avoid begging staple crop from other countries. The lazy and incompetent farmers put the name of the land reform into disrepute. Farmers must shape up or ship out.