Chronicle Editor
Global warming and your capricious – spawned weather conditions beware: Zim’s no-nonsense counter-attacking army is on the march against you.”
Were global warming a human being, the above message would be directed at it in light of climate change and droughts and other, atrocious weather conditions that people, including Zimbabweans must contend with today in the battle for survival.
The second message, directed at people who leave their rural homes in search of jobs abroad or at home is this: “neither torrential jobs nor salary gauges exist in cities or towns for the hungry and unemployed people in flight from their cold village hearths to choose from.”
The answer to, and consolation for, people to whom the two messages above are directed is the way in which the Second Republic has embarked in a bid to counter the effects of recurrent droughts brought about by climate change especially in drought-prone regions of Zimbabwe.
People in Matabeleland South Province as well as those in other rain-starved parts of the country must have been left ecstatic and raring to go by a recent announcement to the effect that the Government with its Meteorological Services Department and in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme had introduced local automatic weather stations to guide people pursuing agricultural projects under irrigation.
A story on local radio said rain gauges would be used to determine the water content in soils under irrigation as a guide to farmers in their productive initiatives.
The obvious outcome of the introduction of the bold new technology in point in this discourse is that when farmers know the state of the ecology in their areas they will proceed with confidence and unflinching determination to produce food for self-sufficiency in our motherland.
It is common knowledge that many families in districts with perennially sparse rainfall run short of food because they rush to grow maize which quickly withers away before maturity instead of small grains such as rapoko, millet and sorghum which have stood the test of time even before the introduction of maize to Africa from the highlands of Mexico in 1500AD by sailors searching for a sea route to India.
Now, with the new technologies introduced to those dry zones of the country farmers prone to growing maize not particularly for its taste as food but for the lucrative price it commands on the market can grow umumbu/chibage under irrigation to help feed the nation and in the process help the Government save valuable foreign currency usually spent on food imports when the country experiences shortfall in what keeps the bodies and souls of our people together.
But be that as it may, this communicologist strongly believes as other people no doubt also do, that increases in the market price of small grains will encourage people to grow more of traditional foods and in the process anchor the strategic transition in food production engendered by technological innovations such as have been introduced at irrigation schemes to bolster our country’s food security.
That way, those foreigners devilishly keen on imposing, and enforcing, economic sanctions to bring down the Zanu-PF Government as punishment for introducing land reforms will become unstuck along with their neo-colonialist ambitions in our motherland.
The armed revolution that brought this country independence and freedom should inspire, and anchor, projects for food self-sufficiency for Zimbabweans to march with full bellies into the future, what with orange trees that homesteads are being encouraged to grow under irrigation to augment families’ nutritional benefits.
Surely the sky must be the limit for the strategic economic transitions underway should Zimbabweans respond to the
Government’s initiatives to ensure that no one in any part of the country starves while the revolutionary Zanu-PF government remains in power.
Blessing Chizhande
Online Reporter