Paradigm shift now in food security

Perspective Stephen Mpofu
WHEN a once upon a time regional breadbasket traverses international boundaries in a desperate search for replenishment, nothing could be a worse indictment of those charged with overseeing food security policies over their failure vigorously to push for contingency measures to avert a grinding famine such as one that now stalks thousands if not millions of Zimbabweans in drought-prone districts after rains failed in those areas.

There can be no justification for any blame being laid solely at the doorstep of global warming and climate change when boomerang effects of those phenomena have been known for years, so that appropriate steps should have been taken to harvest rain when deludes of it fell in order for food crops, in particular, to be grown all year round where necessary for adequate food stocks to be kept in reserve as a precautionary measure against a visitation by drought – something that has caught many Zimbabweans with their pants down, as though warnings of floods and recurrent droughts were still not a familiar household story in postmodern Zimbabwe and elsewhere on the globe.

When President Mugabe lamented this country’s failure to harvest rain for irrigation purposes recently, he must have been speaking for many Zimbabweans indignant at so many dams that government leaders have for years built on the lip, rather than on the ground to trap flood waters running off and away from Zimbabwe to the sea, to conserve water for purposes of irrigation.

Now Zimbabweans are being informed by officialdom of helter-skelter measures to rehabilitate irrigation facilities that were left derelict for lack of proactive guardians of food security to ensure that appropriate measures were put in place to counteract the effects of climate change, the genesis of which dates back many years and in the industrial West.

There, people deliberately did not modify their factory chimneys which pumped carbon gases into the atmosphere because they feared that such measures would make their products more expensive and, as a result, less competitive on the world market.

Those carbon gases trapped the sun’s rays bouncing back from earth, thereby heating up the globe with the consequential climate change that has not spared countries such as Zimbabwe and others in the developing world which were not responsible for spawning global warming in the first place.

But what does the world at large hear today? Those countries responsible for causing global warming in the first place are known now to scapegoat by blaming India as an emerging world economy, among other such fledgling economic giants for global warming.

But, of course, truth is indelible as it were and there can be no justified escapist claims by the primary offenders of global warming.

Be that as it may, however, what needs to be done now around the globe is to take adaptive measures against recurrent floods and droughts caused by global warming’s consequence of climate change.

With that inescapable reality looming large in the minds of policy makers in Zimbabwe, as anywhere else, it is indeed strange that our people succumbed to the lure of money so much so they allowed irrigation facilities — which would have come in handy when drought struck, as it now often does — and instead became engaged in a mad rush for cash crops such as cotton, maize and even tobacco in dry areas where small grains would normally reign supreme as they did before Portuguese explorers introduced corn or maize from South America to Africa as a new, staple diet in the 16th century.

And come to think of it — Zimbabweans were even told by an agricultural expert through television recently that the country had run out of small grains seed.

If that is not a tragic irony – especially when it is known that sorghum, finger millet and pearl millet are strategic food security small grains – then one wonders what is.

In this regard, just what on earth do members of parliament think their job is if they fail so lamentably to take stock of food situations in their constituencies and report shortages of seed for small grains that should secure their constituents against famine?

Or do Honourable Members consider the Parliamentary allowances they draw, and at the right time, more important than the need to ensure that those who sent them to the August House have a steaming hot nutritious dish on the dinner table for their families?

Otherwise how do they explain seed for small grains virtually becoming extinct in drought – prone districts, unless the MPs ceased touring their constituencies when campaigning for election to Parliament?

Whatever the case, Zimbabweans must now go back to the drawing board to get back to the basics of survival in a country ravaged by perennial droughts.

Is it not true, for instance, that some dams built in some areas in colonial Rhodesia have long died, heavily silted as a result of people cultivating near those water reservoirs with no one preventing their irresponsible activities? A countrywide survey might prove this claim correct.

Indeed, why do MPs not mobilise resources and their supporters to build community dams where necessary for people to grow vegetables, or maize when rainy seasons are lean, as well as water their livestock.

But what is likely to be the problem here? People tend to rely on some human being somewhere called the government when they themselves are the government and should of necessity take bold initiatives for self-actualisation through measures to improve their lot.

Independence suggests that people are not perpetually being spoon fed by the institution of government. On the contrary, self-initiative must, and be seen to be, a sine qua non for a people to improve their welfare.

However, as things stand dismally today especially on the food security front, the government might wish to crack its whip to ensure that Zimbabweans adept to climate change with measures that will avert catastrophic results of floods and continuing droughts that, as surely as the sun rises from the east and sets in the west, are on the menu of global warming and climate change.

This suggests that in the absence of any new technologies to counter the effects of climate change, a paradigm shift in food security measures becomes imperative in Zimbabwe’s agricultural economy in order also for livestock to survive drought onslaughts.