Obert Chifamba—
My recent offering on agricultural extension workers triggered an avalanche of reactions from different people. Some said it was spot on, some said it was biased while some could not conceal their simmering anger to meet me face to face and give me their piece of mind.I reckon this last group was predominantly made up of those who were guilty of most of the charges I raised.
Anyway, enough of that but everybody knows the truth about what exactly is happening to our extension services, bad or good. Today’s offering will once again bring extension workers into the ring but with another important player in the performance of the agriculture industry and the food security matrix — the Grain Marketing Board (GMB).
Every time there is talk of food security there is a lot of uncertainty on the probable tonnage of grain that may not have been recorded in the official quantities that a season would have yielded. This always puts Government and other concerned stakeholders in a very precarious position, as they make estimates of the true grain requirements.
My contention is that Agritex and the GMB have a hand in nurturing this complicated situation.
Agriculture extension workers need to work like satellites that gather information and relay it to Government so that planning becomes easier.
They should have all figures on hectarages of crops grown in the areas they are in charge of and monitor the crops from germination to harvesting.
They should even have information on plant populations farmers put per hectare for easy calculation of probable yields while regular visits will give them a clear picture of what a season’s harvests may look like. Once they accomplish this feat, they then need to oversee the storage process of the harvest so that farmers use proper storage methods and curtail post-harvest losses that in some cases are responsible for some food shortages.
It is also at this point that they need to advise farmers on such things as the right moisture content for safe storage or the correct chemicals to apply to keep away pests while maintaining the grain safe for consumption. I remember how as we grew up, extension workers would even come to inspect our temporary storage structure (dara) for maize advising on the need to leave the proper aeration gaps before we shelled it for eventual storage. That is no longer happening.
The extension worker who closely monitors farmers under his jurisdiction always has the capacity to give accurate or near-accurate yield estimates, which allows Government and even the farmers to plan accordingly without either overdoing or underdoing some of the basic things.
My next port of call obviously is the GMB. This is a very critical institution to the country’s food security in many ways. Zimbabwe’s GMB, for instance, is involved in the distribution of inputs and food hand-outs every time the programmes are implemented. The GMB is the country’s chief buyer of grain and is also tasked with building the country’s strategic grain reserves every year.
After buying grain from farmers, GMB advises Government on the quantities yielded in a season and that information is crucial in deciding whether there will be adequate or inadequate grain for food. But the GMB has in recent years successfully failed to discharge this role, as it has forced many farmers to sell their grain to private buyers owing to its failure to pay in time.
This situation has seen farmers only sending a little chunk of their grain to GMB because it usually has the highest price compared to other buyers yet it is always the last to pay or may not even pay.
They instead keep some of their surplus grain or sell it elsewhere and so GMB uses figures that would have come in to define the food security situation, which in most cases will be inaccurate and tends to exaggerate the intensity of the matter.
If GMB can pay promptly like they used to do then all business-minded farmers will sell their grain to the parastatal and nowhere else. GMB always has the highest price both locally and in the region yet it’s the least attractive to farmers.
This has also seen some farmers switching from maize to other cash crops like tobacco whose markets pay promptly and handsomely as well.
The problem with GMB is that they always want Government to fund them yet they are in a position to do many business activities that can generate money, which they can also use while waiting for treasury to release funds. Under such circumstances they can buy grain using their own money and later replace it with what would have come from Government so that they maintain the farmers’ faith in them.
Farmers are business people who want returns from their enterprises to fund new projects so if they cannot get their payments then they obviously side-market, withhold the grain and later sell elsewhere or produce just enough for their domestic consumption- figures which may easily be omitted in the national food security outlook.