DEVELOPMENT-ZAMBIA: From Famine to Feast

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Zarina Geloo

LUSAKA, Sep 23 2004 (IPS) - It has been a bumper year for Zambia on the agricultural front. According to the head of the country’s Food Reserve Agency, Frida Luhila, Zambia is now able to export maize for the first time since the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy came to power in 1991. Maize is the country’s staple food crop.

Zambia produced 1.3 million metric tonnes of maize this season, more than double during the 2001 food crises. The harvest also outstripped the estimated domestic maize consumption requirement of over 900,000 metric tonnes for 2003/2004

Agriculture minister Mundia Sikatana says Zambia will export to neighbouring Zimbabwe, Angola, Malawi and Kenya, all facing major food shortages.

The Food Reserve Agency (FRA), created in 1996 as a statutory body with the mandate to purchase maize and other cereals for the national reserve, has over 109,000 metric tonnes of maize in stock. These include more than 57,000 tonnes it brought last season and another 53 tonnes it purchased since the beginning of the maize marketing season in June this year.

FRA chief Frida Luhila says the agency has sold 50,000 metric tonnes of maize to Angola with an understanding that there could be more exports if the country can pay. Malawi has bought 1,000 metric tonnes of maize worth about 160,000 dollars.

A further 70,000 metric tonnes of maize will be exported to Malawi, if the bidding falls through, Luhila says.

Kenya, too, has made inquiries about the possibility of importing Zambian maize. Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki declared the food crises in his country a national disaster and has appealed for international help to feed more than 3 million Kenyans facing hunger due to drought. A joint report by the government, the United Nations and other aid agencies says that if rains fail between October and December this year, an extra million people could need food aid.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) also wants to buy Zambia’s entire crop of maize.

Luhila says a quarter of Zambia’s maize can be stored in either stock or cash. “We do not want to keep maize for too long in storage, we sell or export some and buy fresh stocks from our farmers … we must also keep a revolving system for liquid cash.”

The agency gets a government subsidy to buy 61,000 metric tonnes; it has bought about 52 metric tonnes from selected districts in all the country’s nine provinces. But, to ire of farmers, it’s now offering to buy the rest of the produce on credit.

Southern Africa Confederation of Agriculture Unions president Ajay Vashee says buying maize on credit has not worked well in the past. Government has not honoured its obligations and farmers have found themselves not only without food, but without cash to buy implements for the next planting season. Vahee, a former Zambia National Union of Farmers president, recommends that FRA shores up all its resources and pay cash for all the food produced.

Small-scale farmers, who produce 80 percent of the country’s food, fear that with the end of the marketing season (November), maize – still lying in the outlaying areas – might go to ruin when the rains start next month as farmers do not have storage sheds.

Silos and storage sheds built in the early 1980s have gone to ruin as the government, which came to power in 1991, removed subsidies on agriculture and left everything to the market. Now with a refocus on agriculture and the reintroduction of subsidies, government is short of money to rehabilitate the dilapidated structures.

“It appears we have been caught by surprise by our own productivity. This is the second season of good harvest and the first time we are looking at exports,” farmer Norton Chirwa says.

Like many peasant farmers, Chirwa says private maize traders will take advantage of the desperation of farmers to sell their crop and offer low prices.

He says the FRA does not provide for transportation of maize to its depots, so the farmers living far from FRA-appointed warehouses have to bear transportation costs which add to the overheads. With the bad roads, transporters are also reluctant to travel far into the hinterlands.

“Again it is the farmers who will suffer, yet we work so hard. Government will lose the opportunity to empower farmers,” Chirwa warns.

But Luhila says the FRA will mop up produce in areas left by private traders. “We will ensure that nothing goes to waste. We are trying hard to make government release all the money budgeted for to buy food and even source more money to buy any more that might be left out there.”

Zambia’s bumper crop has been a result of reintroduction of agricultural subsides in 2001. It’s also attributed to a number of technological innovations like mixed farming, conservation farming and a diversification programme which brought in the production of pulses and legumes like cassava (manioc), millet and sweet potatoes, as food crops.

Despite the country’s increase in food production, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has cautioned that there were still close to 430,000 people in chronically food insecure districts throughout Zambia. WFP spokesperson in Lusaka said these were vulnerable people who lost all their assets during the previous emergency and who had been affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

“Generally, the food situation has improved but there are still regions which had less production and who require assistance. We will work closely with government to look into their needs,” says the WFP spokesperson.

In 2002, over 2 million Zambians needed emergency food aid after a series of droughts.