Smallholders Feed a Nation as Land Reform Fails
By Misheck Rusere
HARARE , Jul 23 2013 (IPS) – Moses Chiengerere is one of the Zimbabwe’s
hundreds of thousands of smallholder maize farmers keeping this southern
African nation’s granaries stocked with the grain.
“I make it a point that anything over 24 bags (about two tonnes) goes to the
(government) Grain Marketing Board, so that I can get some cash. The prices
are poor but the only advantage is that if you sell to them, you will get
first preference to buy grain in the event of a drought,” he tells IPS,
attributing his successful harvest to the use of cow dung as a compound
fertiliser.
Small-scale farmers – who previously contributed slightly less than half of
the 1.8 million tonnes of grain to the Grain Marketing Board’s national
reserve annually – have been left to fill it almost entirely.
This is because Zimbabwe’s commercial farmers, most of whom are
beneficiaries of the country’s controversial and violent land reform
programme of 2000, are producing way below expectation, despite occupying
the most productive land.
Under the programme more than 300,000 people forcefully occupied land
previously owned and occupied by an estimated 4,000 white commercial
farmers. They were also awarded the title deeds to the land.
But according to a report released in July by the Zimbabwe National
Statistics Agency, titled “National Poverty Income Consumption and
Expenditure Survey”, commercial farmers contributed a paltry 15,6 percent to
the national reserve last year.
In 1994, commercial famers, who farm plots of land ranging from six to 20
hectares, contributed 2.1 million tonnes of maize to the national reserve.
While there are no official figures about the number of smallholder maize
farmers here, the Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union (ZFU) estimates that there are six
million smallholders farming on six hectares or less. Aside from maize,
these smallholder farmers also harvest crops such as sorghum and millet.
Several reasons have been given by experts for the increased contribution by
smallholder famers to the country’s grain reserves.
According to agricultural expert and executive director of the African
Institute for Agrarian Studies, Professor Sam Moyo, it is a direct result of
the commercialisation of grain production by smallholder farmers who
previously only grew the crop for survival.
And it has resulted in commercial farmers concentrating on other cash crops
that give higher returns, he tells IPS.
“With new policies encouraging technology, extension services, new seeds and
fertiliser to small-scale farmers, their production started growing.
“Since they also eat the crop, they have very high incentive to grow it.
They are now competing very well with commercial famers,” says Moyo, adding
that smallholder farmers occupy 65 to 70 percent of the country’s
agricultural land.
Ted Mandizha from Mashonaland West Province is one of those farmers who
grows the crop for his family’s survival and then sells any excess. He tells
IPS that he keeps aside about 1.5 tonnes of his maize harvest for his family’s
consumption, but usually sells two tonnes of his annual maize crop to the
Grain Marketing Board.
Despite the ever-shortening seasons of rainfall, he is able to produce a
bountiful crop. Mandizha believes that the use of seed designed for short
seasons offers him an advantage.
“It is matter of using short-season variety seed and also drought-resistant
seed. They all contribute to a better yield in this day and age of climate
change,” says Mandizha, who has been farming for more than 20 years.
Planting his crop earlier in the season also makes a difference, he says.
“One of the tricks in ensuring that you get a better yield is to plant your
crops earlier. That’s what I do, so that by the time the rains come, your
crop is already advanced and sometimes it will use the underground moisture
to mature. It is different from the old days when we used to have some
longer rainfall seasons,” he says.
But while smallholder farmers like Mandizha are receiving support and
subsidies, Moyo points out that government policies are unsupportive of
commercial famers and fail to help them adapt to the changing trends in
agriculture.
Moyo gave the example of Zambia, where a 50-kg bag of fertiliser that would
normally cost around 40 dollars is sold at a subsidised price of about 10
dollars. However, in Zimbabwe, the same bag of fertiliser is sold at the
market price of between 35 and 50 dollars. Moyo says these high prices make
grain production unviable, and hence commercial farmers are moving to other
crops like tobacco and horticulture.
ZFU director Paul Zakaria tells IPS that the gap between commercial and
communal output is due to the commercial farmers’ inability to practise
large-scale agriculture without proper resources.
“If you want to irrigate, you should have a pump that is working, you should
have power, either diesel or hydro-electricity, you should have the
financial capacity to do that. We all know that most of the people that were
resettled on commercial farms (do not have these resources),” Zakaria says.