SIMPLE village wisdom has impacted on the continued growth of Zimbabwe’s agricultural revolution which has seen the country producing its largest wheat harvest ensuring that the nation becomes food secure, President Mnangagwa said yesterday.
In his presentation at the Dakar II Feed Africa Summit, the President spoke on Zimbabwe’s vision for growth in agriculture, regional integration, public-private partnerships, and scaling up success stories.
President Mnangagwa said village philosophy entails that a country must be ruled and developed by the people of that country.
“In Zimbabwe we had the problem of food insecurity and we said, how much food do we want in a year to feed our nation and the figure we got was two million tonnes of grain. So we said, because there is climate change, how many hectares of land can we put under irrigation to produce two million-plus tonnes to feed the nation and we determined how much yield does a hectare have hence we knew the figures and we did that and we are now food secure.
“Secondly we had been importing our wheat from Ukraine and fertiliser from Russia. Now that side is problematic. We thus decided to say we need about 240 000 tonnes of wheat, so how many hectares do we need under irrigation to grow wheat and we calculated and put that number under wheat and we are now wheat sufficient and we believe next season we will be able to export wheat,” said the President.
To solve the fertiliser problem, the country also explored the option of producing its own fertiliser after noting that Zimbabwe has all the materials for fertiliser production.
“Also it is necessary that we harvest water and we have a programme where we are constructing dams in all our eight agricultural provinces and making sure we irrigate enough land to feed the nation,” said President Mnangagwa.
The Second Republic’s industrialisation and modernisation agenda which was anchored on the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1), the framework towards Vision 2030 to become an upper-middle class economy, has yielded a number of resounding success stories inclusive of wheat harvest which was the highest wheat harvest in the 56 years since large-scale commercial wheat production started.
The country has seen food insecurity consistently growing. Official figures show that between 2015 and 2020, the proportion of food-insecure rural population ranged between 30 and 59 percent and urban vulnerability was also on the rise reaching 30 percent or 2,2 million people by 2020.
The President travelled to the summit with Lands, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development Minister Dr Anxious Masuka, Finance and Economic Development Minister Prof Mthuli Ncube and Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Ambassador Frederick Shava.
The three-day summit is being held under the theme: “Feeding Africa: Food Security and Resilience”. The summit is being hosted by Senegalese President and AU Chairperson Macky Sall, with the African Development Bank Group coming in as co-hosts. Just over 1 500 delegates are attending.
In his opening remarks, President Sall emphasised the need for Africa to come together in ensuring the continent is food secure noting there was an important need to focus on small-holder farmers as they also hold the key towards the growth of the sector.
“As Africa, we must support small-holder farmers so that they are not sacrificed for the benefit of large-scale agriculture in terms of financing. The land reform is an extremely important process in Africa and requires a reconciliation between family requirements and the requirements of agribusiness for large-scale production.”
President Sall said special attention had to be given to the access of land for women and the youth in the continent.
“We have the trajectory of the Africa with problems which has maintained us in statistical situation within Agriculture which will continue to expose us to food precariousness highly dependent on climate hazards but furthermore we also have a trajectory of Africa with solutions which places us on a prospect of modern agriculture and this will lead us to food sovereignty beyond resilience.
“Dakar 2 will want to be part of a momentum of solutions. We want to remain combative, resolute and be able to rise up to the challenges we face. This is a time for action so that we ensure that the Feed Africa Summit is a success and that there is food sovereignty in Africa,” said President Sall.
The first summit was held in 2015, during which the Feed Africa Strategy for Agricultural Transformation (2016-2025) in Africa, was proposed. – The Herald
