IRIN: ...Erratic weather patterns in recent years and the
disruptions caused by the 2000 fast-track land reform programme, which
redistributed more than 4,000 white commercial farms to landless blacks, have
combined to transform previously food secure Zimbabwe into a food insecure
country in the past decade.
Poor rainfall during the 2011/12 season is expected to bring
lower yields from the previous year, but the exact extent of any food
insecurity is difficult to gauge. UN agencies, including the World Food
Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which used to
assess and report on crops to assist food security, have again been barred - as
they were in 2011 - on the grounds of “national security”.
...Agriculture minister Joseph Made said during a field trip
with delegates from several African countries in March 2012 that it was “time
the country adopts crop diversification and accommodates small grains on a very
serious note”, because the government is forced to make up crop shortfalls with
cereal imports.
''A lot needs to be done to convince communal farmers to
grow small grains. Even in the most arid regions like Matabeleland [in southern
Zimbabwe], farmers are still stuck with maize as a staple crop,” Denford
Chimbwanda, the former president of the Grain and Cereal Producers Association
(GCPA), told IRIN.
''Despite the poor uptake of small grains by smallholder
farmers, there have been efforts to promote these drought-resistant crops since
the 1950s,” Sam Moyo, an agriculture expert and director of the African
Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS), told IRIN. ''Calls to convert to small
grains are not a new phenomenon - there are complex issues to address, though.”...
Nkazimulo Ngwenya, Scientific Officer at
ICRISAT-Bulawayo, checks the pearl millet seed crop at Matopos Research
Station in Zimbabwe. Shot by Swathi Sridharan (ICRISAT), Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
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