adminThe same script keeps popping up every year in a seasonal production entitled “Farming Preparations: Tale of Input, Output’s Saboteur”. The directors are the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Finance and the location being some dry wheat farm in some part of Zimbabwe where Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe-sourced farming equipment will be used during the shooting of the episodes.
There are sighs all round as the production draws to a close each year, and how it manages to draw crowds every year remains a mystery even to the most experienced arts critic. If such a production existed only in the Utopian realm, we could dismiss it with a chuckle, shrug and move on with our lives.
However, since the setting is real and the production live with actors assuming their registered names, it is a shocking indictment of the shortcomings of our bureaucracy that failure has been replicated each year with such religious precision.
Chronicle this week carried a story on the failure by Matabeleland North farmers to plant winter wheat, despite the launch of a $20 million Government scheme to support the winter crop. Matabeleland North Province’s failure to grow winter wheat could just be the tip of an iceberg since other provinces where wheat is supposed to be grown are also faced with the same problems of high input costs against lack of funding.
Matabeleland North last year had a target of 1 205 hectares to be put under wheat with Matabeleland South expected to grow 2 032 hectares of the irrigated crop.
Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development Minister Dr Joseph Made recently said the $20 million scheme would see 26 280 hectares of land going under wheat nationally to meet the national target of 75 000 tonnes, against our annual requirements of 450 000 tonnes of wheat.
The farmers are justifiably unhappy with the Government’s failure to support the winter wheat programme, at a time when even the likes of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority have gone out of their way to ensure a successful season by availing sufficient power for farmers. Both the Zimbabwe Farmers Union and the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union have lamented the lack of Government support, a growing phenomenon that is experienced even with the summer cropping season where some inputs were distributed as late as February this year!
The deputy president of theZFU, Mr Abdul Nyathi, warned that the country would be forced to import more wheat leading to bread price increases if the trend was not arrested. We share his concern deeply.
“The situation is very bad because farmers had put hope on the announced scheme but nothing has come. This means there would be an unavoidable importation of wheat.
“Whoever has planted it is just for consumption and not commercial,” said Mr Nyathi.
This is especially worrying seeing that the deadline for winter wheat planting was 15 May. The biggest challenge that Zimbabwe’s farming sector has always faced is poor planning and the planners’ shortcomings are usually engrafted onto the farmers poor harvests, leading to the false impression that we did not have good farmers. We believe the pattern has repeated itself several times over and it is time heads rolled so that we get people in Government who know why they are in those offices.
We demand action and co-operation from financial institutions since farming is seasonal business that cannot be undertaken at the ministers’ or bankers’ convenience. The country runs the risk of losing grain crop farmers to cash crops such as tobacco due to their better return unless the government addresses the perennial input supply problems that stem from the demands for a huge capital outlay in farming.
The shambolic showings in the past few years will certainly see lesser crowds turning up for the grain crop productions and Government should consider advertising for new directors for the next offering and our view is that auditions for that role are long overdue. The audience could turn to cash crop productions where the script runs along the lines of a hero whose name is Output due to Planner’s ingenuity to subdue Challenge.
Online Reporter