2012 winter wheat doomed
http://www.financialgazette.co.zw/
Friday, 22 June 2012 10:16
Nelson Chenga, Staff Reporter
NORTON — The land, tinted by browning vegetation stretches far and wide.
Huge swathes of maize fields are yet to be reaped, two months past harvest
time. Further afield, even more vast expanses of land lie fallow. An odd
green patch here and there breaks the tanned panorama, completing a snapshot
of Zim-babwe’s prime farming area of Norton.
Traditionally, at this time of the year, much of the land in this part of
the country was lush. Watered by sprinklers and pivots, young wheat shoots
should be flourishing as winter sets in. However, the prevailing scenery
tells a different story, a tale which starkly points to the country’s doomed
winter wheat cropping season yet. This, to a large extent, epitomises the
demise of Zim-babwe’s agricultural sector.
Pointers on the ground suggest the southern African nation is firmly on
track to achieving its worst winter wheat crop, as farmers confess to the
looming crop failure, which they largely blame on the country’s relentless
electricity load shedding by power utility, ZESA.
The country’s winter wheat production heavily relies on electricity to power
irrigation pumps: Any other alternatives such as generators will push costs
through the roof, rendering the business unprofitable.
The decline in wheat output this year translates to a massive wheat import
bill for Zim-babwe’s inclusive government whose coffers are already dry.
The government’s target of producing some 75 000 tonnes of wheat on 26 280
hectares, after injecting US$20 million into winter wheat production, is
already completely off the mark with figures on the uptake of the loan
facility being disbursed by CBZ Bank showing that farmers have accessed a
mere US$664 000.
Ironically, the farmers could not access the loan facility last year because
the inputs were released way past the May 15 wheat planting deadline for
most of the regions.
A CBZ official, speaking on condition that he remained unnamed, said: “Most
farmers are afraid of ZESA’s load shedding antics. They are telling us that
if they are not assured of constant power supply then there is no point
taking the risk.”
In April, the Zimba-bwe Farmers Union warned that: “With no electricity
there is no wheat to talk about lest there is a miracle.”
The decline in wheat production comes at a time when the Food and
Agricultural Organisation has projected the crop’s second highest record
global yield of 690 million tonnes for 2012.
Last year, Zimbabwe harvested a paltry 41 000 tonnes on 14 100 hec-tares,
which hardly satiated the country’s 400 000 to 450 000 tonnes requi-rement
for wheat, the nation’s second staple crop after maize.
While farmers blame, among a litany of other reasons, ZESA’s incessant power
outages and poor government funding of agriculture for their failure to
produce enough wheat to feed the nation, a visit to Norton by The Financial
Gazette revealed another overlooked dimension to the ever dwindling winter
wheat crop.
Norton is part of Natural Region II, a 58,600 square-kilometre piece of land
occupying the country’s Highveld, which stretches into parts of Mashona-land
East, West and Central provinces.
Classified as an area suitable for intensive crop and livestock production,
this piece of land is Zimbabwe’s key winter wheat producing area. In 1985,
according to the Zimbabwe Statistics Office’s 1985 Government Statistical
Year Book, 74 percent of Natural Region II was occupied by large scale
commercial farms, 22 percent by communal farmers and four percent by small
scale commercial farmers.
But the 2000 land reform programme that led to the occupation of large scale
commercial farms by communal farmers, effectively redefined the agricultural
pattern of the entire Natural Region II.
The land reform programme remapped the area by bringing in more communal
farmers (A1) and more commercial farmers (A2) who, unfortunately, were
under-resourced to continue practicing the intensive crop and livestock
farming the area had become famous for.
Without the necessary financial and material resources, the majority of
beneficiaries of both the A1 and A2 model schemes are currently engaged in
what they know best: subsistence farming, a realm of agriculture that offers
very little options for wheat production, which currently costs an estimated
US$1 800 per hectare.