Chronicle Reporter
THE Minister of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water, Climate and Rural Resettlement Dr Anxious Masuka has said Government is rehabilitating vandalised infrastructure on farms and so far infrastructure on 45 000 hectares has been assessed.

Responding to questions in Parliament last week, Minister Masuka said Government has plans to put 350 000 hectares under irrigation in the next three years.

He said Treasury has already been approached to release funds to rehabilitate some of the farms.

“We need a total of 350 000 hectares to climate proof our agriculture into the future so that we can produce sufficiently to meet our annual national needs. Specifically for the vandalised infrastructure — we have done an assessment. We have assessed irrigation infrastructure on 45 000 hectares on A1 and A2 farms requiring rehabilitation,” said Minister Masuka.

“We have included this in the accelerated irrigation rehabilitation plan and just last week, the first 21 000 hectares identified were submitted to Treasury for funding. My expectation therefore, is that we will be able to see an acceleration of the rehabilitation of the farm infrastructure to enable the irrigation to commence.”

Minister Masuka said the accelerated irrigation rehabilitation plan is anchored on utilising 10 000 dams in the different provinces.

He said Government is developing a master plan at Tugwi-Mukorsi Dam in Masvingo.

Minister Masuka said there is an inter-ministerial committee that is looking at 12 projects from fishing, boating, higher and tertiary education, tourism, small and medium enterprises and agriculture in that area.

“That is about 95 percent complete but the purpose of establishing the Tugwi-Mukosi was bigger than that. It was for irrigation and the irrigation takes place 80 km away downstream of Tugwi-Mukorsi where we have identified 40  000 hectares in Mwenezi district. The rest of the hectarage is in Chiredzi district,” he said.

“The Chiredzi land is on existing A2 and other communal areas that are largely now taken up. We envisage however, that within Mwenezi, there will be a standard development and some defined hectarage being made available for prospective investors for which we invite Zimbabwean companies to participate. We also anticipate that in that process, the activities around Tugwi-Mukorsi will then be available for interested Zimbabweans to invest. So it is something that we are working on and we are nearing completion and there will a public statement in that regard.”