adminMhlupheki Dube
A FRIEND of mine from Binga who is into politics told me of his strategy in influencing development agenda in his area. He said each time there is a meeting called to discuss development issues, he does not wait to learn and know what the agenda is but will just straightaway raise his hand and plunge into issues in his mind.
This usually has the net effect of influencing the programme implementers and shaping their perceptions around what needs to be done and more often than not solutions are sought to address the issues raised.
I will borrow that strategy this week and shoot from the hip aiming at the noble exercise of command agriculture. I touched on this aspect in the last instalment and indicated that I am still learning what it is all about. I have since learnt a lot from that time which is precisely the motivation for this article.
Command agriculture is all about ensuring food security. However, there is this inaccurate assumption that food security is only about producing enough crops. I wish to point out that food security also talks to the availability of disposable income which people can then use to purchase the available food items. In that regard I remain convinced that command agriculture needs to look at the livestock production side of agriculture. Since it is about financing agricultural production is it not a good idea to broaden the funding basket to cover livestock production?
It is known that most of the commercial livestock producers in the country today be they black or white benefited from the heifer loan scheme which was run by Cold Storage Company at its peak.
Most if not all of these respected livestock producers and breeders got one form of support or another from CSC. I interact with a lot of livestock farmers in my line of work and they all cry for the Government to come up with a vehicle to support livestock production specifically on the restocking side of things. Since the demise of CSC, there has not been a meaningful livestock financing scheme on restocking despite the fact that we now have an increased frequency of droughts and by extension livestock mortalities.
Even outside mortalities induced restocking. There are farmers who got land during the land reform and they have not been able to stock it to its potential because no such loan schemes have been advanced to them. This is actually putting a strain on these farmers as they find it hard to pay the unit tax for their farms because there are severely understocked.
It is in that regard that I wish to influence powers that are behind the command agriculture initiative to look into the livestock production side of things despite their original conceptualisation of the whole initiative. I will be the happiest man if suddenly we hear that under command agriculture, the Government will finance purchase of so many thousands of heifers for loaning to livestock producers in Matabeleland in return for this and that.
This therefore, is a loud and unambiguous call appealing for the inclusion of livestock farmers when defining agriculture and when crafting agriculture support programmes.
I have spoken before and I will still speak now against the one-size-fits-all approach to agriculture. This has seen misdirection of resources at times such as allocation of a combine harvester to a farmer practicing dry land farming in Matabeleland.
Firstly, he doesn’t have enough land holding for the size of equipment and secondly, rainfall patterns do not allow rain-fed crop production to yield quantities that justify the existence of such an investment.
Wouldn’t it have been more useful to use the money to buy heifers and loan to farmers or buy bulls to improve quality of communal herd?
That having been said I want to applaud and appreciate Government efforts in making sure the nation is food secure. A food secure nation is a productive nation and God knows we need that production. Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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derick.khumalo