Thursday, May 24, 2012

Small grains are tough sell in Zimbabwe


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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