EDITIRIAL COMMENT: Grain surpluses need to be stored for now

Wariness about resuming grain exports, even with the excellent harvest expected this year, is more than justified and remains justified until we reach a position where we either have such huge surpluses in stock that we can cope with successive drought years or we have such high levels of irrigation that we can produce surpluses in a drought year.

The rainfall in Southern Africa is very variable. A wonderful season can be followed by a severe drought, and back-to-back droughts are not unknown. So it makes sense that we can cope with this, building up stocks in the good years so we can eat our own home-grown food in the bad years.

We have seen this with the Second Republic and its stress on pushing harvests and introducing conservation agriculture to improve yields and so harvests. The many new programmes came to fruition in the 2020-2021 season, and there were surpluses of summer grains and the wheat deficit was cut back sharply.

Then in the 2021-2022 season, despite the forecast of a normal season, there was that long dry spell in the middle of the season, which the resumption of rain and a late end to the season last year did not balance, at least for crops. 

While the total rainfall was around the normal level, that poor distribution cut yields.

In fact, the maize harvest last year was less than a year’s supply. Many of us did not notice and even the millers and those responsible for food relief in rural areas were not affected once it was realised that the surpluses of the previous season had been properly stored and were ready to eat. 

We have been eating this grain over the last 12 months, and because the Grain Marketing Board has a policy, like a supermarket owner or a family with its pantry, of selling the older stock first we lost nothing.

Because the actual total rainfall, although coming in what almost amounted to two separate seasons, was not that much off normal, the dams filled or almost filled, and the aquifers were adequately charged, so the wheat farmers had enough water to produce the first ever surplus of that grain in the history of the country.

But that dry spell and its aftermath did stress the need to build reserves. No one has any real idea of when the next drought will hit, and just how bad it will be, but the result will be a diminished yield for dry-land farmers, and if the drought lasts into a second season there could even be irrigation rationing for wheat farmers. 

So we need to make sure that we have the stocks on hand. The Government has, very sensibly, during its reforms for the GMB split the general commercial work of the board from its contract work of maintaining the carry-over stocks, what we call the strategic reserve. 

This year the pre-planting prices for the first time included the GMB selling prices, which include the very modest mark-up that the board is allowed to charge to finance the administration and the costs of storing gain for up to 12 months. The Government itself budgets for the longer-term storage, so that farmers or consumers do not have to pay that extra cost, except in the general sense that it comes out of our taxes, and that means it is really spread across all pockets, even those belonging to those who just pay sales tax.

We can debate how large reserves should be: perhaps three months, perhaps six months, perhaps nine months, perhaps even a year. The modest costs of storing grain can be thought of as an insurance policy, against the day when we suddenly have one of the worst droughts in living memory and considering the climate change and climate variability we now experience we need that sort of insurance.

A second factor we need to consider is who would be buying our surplus grain and who would sell us grain if we misjudged the correct size of reserves and had to import large amounts. As we now know, rainfall patterns across Southern Africa tend to be regional in extent. 

If we have a good season then our neighbours have good seasons, and if we have drought then our neighbours have drought. 

Most countries in the region have reorganised their agriculture industries, in different ways, but generally speaking if we have a surplus then our neighbours have a surplus, so any markets would be some distance away, pushing up transport costs. 

Being a small inland country at the end of a continent means we would have to quote quite large transport costs for distant markets. The same problem comes in reverse if there is a drought. 

Again our neighbours might be hit as hard, and so imports would come from further afield.

The days when Zimbabwe, perhaps incorrectly, was called the breadbasket of the region, date from a different time, when our population was smaller and some neighbours were still trying to properly organise their agricultural industries, and when we had a reasonable run of reasonable seasons. 

That ended with the double drought of the early 1990s when the whole region had to import and governments started thinking very hard about how to give their farmers a much better deal so they would grow more. They all did, so our markets were automatically reduced.

Even if we build up stocks to sufficiently high levels that we can cope with a drought and still have stocks over, then we can help out a bit regionally. 

There have been cases when Malawi and Tanzania were able to sell us maize from their strategic stocks to cope with a very bad season here, but these were not seen as regular annual trade, more a good neighbourly measure after some careful risk assessment by the Government concerned.

At the same time we need to think what we want to export, if we get to the stage where food exports should resume. A major advance in recent years has been to add value to exports before the lorries or trains go over the border, so perhaps we need to think about selling bags and sacks of maize meal and flour and the new products coming from traditional grains, rather than raw grain. 

The African Continental Free Trade Area should open opportunities for some of the more processed consumer products in regular trade, so long as the food processing companies remember that they must be contracting and paying Zimbabwean farmers to produce their extra raw materials. 

It costs the same to transport a tonne of raw grain and a tonne of fancy consumer products made from that same grain, but selling for three times as much. 

So exporting products rather than grain cuts the percentage of costs devoted to transport.

We could also adopt other policies as our farmers push production and yields. When we talk about an upper middle income country we are also talking about farmers at least doubling or tripling the value of their output, so we need to think output of what. At that sort of level we can assume national self-sufficiency in all basic foods, so we will need to think hard about what more we grow. 

We might want to even cut the hectarage of maize, for example, if yields are sufficiently high that we can harvest enough for what we eat, taking good seasons with bad, on less and coping with what sort of export markets we can develop. Farmers still need to double their income so they need to use the land to grow other crops, one that they can sell locally or find more lucrative export markets.

Now that we are the sort of country that can grow more than it eats these are the sort of questions we need to start debating. We still have a couple of years to work out how to expand farm output the best way, since we a building reserves.