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The threat of erratic or reduced rainfall this season associated with the El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean has strengthened the determination of the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development to have the right crops planted in each area and to pay farmers decent prices for what they produce.
Over the past couple of years, the ministry has been strongly discouraging the gamble, and gamble it is, of planting maize in the ecological regions four and five.
Generally speaking historical records show that a maize farmer in these regions without irrigation can get a reasonable crop in only one year out of five, and that is not really good enough any more when more inputs are required.
Traditional grains can cope far better with dry spells, as well as lower seasonal rainfall, and so need to be stressed not just in the more arid regions, but also perhaps planted as an “insurance crop” in the better watered regions along with maize.
The Agricultural ministry, through its Pfumvudza/Intwasa programme for small-scale farmers, can decide what crops are grown and what varieties of seed are used by most small-scale farmers, and the banks and other finance agencies, including private sector contractors, can make sure that larger-scale commercial farmers minimise their risks by planting appropriate varieties and crops.
Seed houses have been asked to be thoughtful when they supply shops and farmers and make sure that they supply and sell in each area the most suitable seed. Pushing these sort of policies means that almost every farmer will have a harvest and will not be wasting their seed, fertiliser, and labour.
A lot of other efforts are being made to ensure farmers can make a profit. In the oil seeds, the main emphasis is now on sunflower and cotton. Cotton production is rising rapidly, and this crop does grow in more arid areas, and produces a double harvest, one of fibre and one of oil seed.
In fact cotton seed was the main vegetable oil outside the olive oil regions for some decades before it was needed for other uses in the Second World War and soya was brought in as a substitute, although it oxidises fairly quickly and so does not last as long.
Sunflower is another oil seed that can tolerate partial drought and has an exceptionally high oil content, 30 percent, which pushes it ahead of every other oil seed. Soya is now increasingly being seen as a protein food, mainly for livestock, rather than a primary oil seed in Zimbabwe, although cooking oil is a useful by-product.
This stress on the easier to grow cotton and sunflower is moving Zimbabwe towards self-sufficiency in vegetable oils, and because these two crops have far greater drought tolerance they are being pushed in all ecological zones, even in the special circumstances of the coming season.
Tobacco researchers have developed varieties with better drought tolerance and have also done some fundamental research on growing conditions, which allow farmers to cope with dry spells and the like.
This ties in with the Pfumvudza climate-proofing for grain, sunflowers, legumes and cotton where the holes, zero tillage, and extensive mulching do a lot to stop soils drying out and maintain respectable soil moisture levels, making best use of whatever rain does fall.
At the same time, the Agriculture Ministry, backed by the Ministry of Finance and Investment Promotion for obvious budgetary reasons, is maintaining a pricing policy that not just guarantees markets, but gives Zimbabwean farmers a premium of roughly 15 percent over world prices.
Part of this can be justified by the high transport costs when importing food, and part as a sort of insurance premium to make sure Zimbabwe does not have to import food.
Considering the sorts of global problems, such as the Russian-Ukraine conflict that can interrupt supplies of wheat and sunflower from those two major exporters, or the growing climate instability around the world, paying your own farmers to grow your own food makes a great deal of financial sense, as does helping them grow enough for their own households instead of free handouts of largely imported grain.
As always, someone has brought up the possibility of subsidised maize meal once again, and once again this has been shot down.
The attempt to subsidise roller meal in the early days of the Second Republic was a failure and simply confirmed the modern economic wisdom that subsidies are always a market distortion that never really benefit the poor.
The problem, as most remember, was that roller meal disappeared from the shelves and ended up in the black market being sold at a normal market price, with the subsidy disappearing in the pockets of the criminals.
The other problem of subsidies is that they benefit the rich more than the poor, since the rich consume more of the subsidised products.
Far more sensible was the new policy of direct cash grants to the very poor so they could afford to buy normally-priced basic food, saving the money spent on the rich and on the criminals.
Climate change is already a significant problem for Zimbabwe and is likely to get worse, since Zimbabwe is one of the zones that come off less well under global warming. The major efforts made by the Agriculture Ministry, which also handles water resources and irrigation, will ameliorate these effects.
Research in both the State and private sectors is developing more varieties or more crops that can cope better with water stress, and is developing more sophisticated, but still easy to use farming techniques that create and conserve soil moisture.
Some of these require major shifts in practice, but the benefits quickly speak for themselves and the wary traditionalists soon follow the lead of their more productive neighbours.
This is the sort of solid research needed, along with leaving out wishful thinking, to make sure that our farmers can make good money growing our food and providing ever more industrial raw materials, with bad weather being a nuisance, and sometimes a serious nuisance, but not a disaster.
Online Reporter