Aid has made major difference in Zimbabwe, says UN report

A United Nations report has found that food security in Zimbabwe has improved signficiantly, but that agricultural and food assistance will still be vital for around 1.68 million people next year.

The report follows a joint mission to Zimbabwe in June by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to assess the national crop and food security situation.

The mission found that food security in the country has improved following government efforts and an international assistance programme which has been providing farmers with subsidised inputs.

They say that the area planted under maize, the main staple, increased by 20 per cent in 2010 to the highest level in 30 years and production rose 7 per cent over 2009.

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Talking about a successful harvest

Photo: Flickr

Planning for plenty

The Grain Marketing Board (GMB), the sole buyer and seller of grain in Zimbabwe, is planning to sell agricultural inputs and become a “one stop shop” for farmers.

The GMB has been mired in controversy in recent years, and has been accused of providing preferential treatment to supporters of President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party – senior party members and military officials allegedly received distributions of scarce maize, the staple food, and were handed agricultural inputs that were then resold on the informal market at greatly increased prices.

Maize is subject to price controls in Zimbabwe. GMB corporate affairs manager Muriel Zemura told IRIN that the board was paying US$265 a ton for maize, and had arranged with agricultural input suppliers to sell fertilizer, seed, chemicals and other inputs at its depots.

“After farmers have collected their money for delivering their maize to the GMB, they will, within the same complex, be able to buy most or all the inputs that they need for the new agricultural season,” she said.

“The inputs on sale at our depots belong to the manufacturers, and not ourselves, so we are making it convenient for the farmers so that they don’t spend a lot of money on travel costs.”

Zemura dismissed any allegations of past GMB impropriety, and said so far the GMB had received fertilizer and chemicals, but not maize seed. The planting season is due to start in September/October.

The unity government, formed in February 2009 between Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, said recently it would target small-scale farmers with agricultural inputs to boost food production, but did not elaborate on how these would be distributed.

Zemura said the GMB was well-positioned to fulfil the distribution role. “Nothing has been said officially to us about distributing any inputs, but we are anticipating that it will happen. We have the skills, logistical ability, capacity, and we have a presence throughout the country.”

A combination of environmental and political factors has decimated Zimbabwe’s once thriving agricultural economy in the last decade; in the first quarter of 2009 nearly 7 million people depended on food aid.

Building on Malawi’s success

“As the government, we want to make sure that small-scale farmers in communal areas get the requisite support from the government, since they contribute between 60 [percent] and 70 percent of our grain output,” Tsvangirai told a recent meeting of businessmen and farmers in the arid province of Masvingo, 300km southeast of the capital, Harare.

He said they would borrow from the Malawian model, in which small-scale farmers had produced about 3.7 million tons of maize in 2009, compared to the 1.2 million tons produced jointly by Zimbabwe’s commercial and small-scale farmers.

“We want to make sure that this coming agricultural season is a success, through the wholehearted support from the government to at least one million households that we have targeted to assist with fertilizer and seed, and we hope that is going to go a long way in providing food security.”

Malawi first implemented an agricultural subsidy programme in early 2000, and by the 2008/09 farming season about 1.7 million small-scale farmers had benefited. Small-scale farmers were able to buy inputs at one-tenth of the usual price – the costs being borne by both donors and government – and were also not obliged to repay the balance of the subsidy.

However, Malawi’s subsidy programme has elicited concerns over being open to corruption, and not the most cost-efficient method of delivering food security.

Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe’s minister of finance, has set aside US$140 million to procure agricultural inputs for small-scale farmers. “Malawi is a very small country compared to Zimbabwe, and of the 3.8 million tons produced in that country, the bulk of the crop came from small-scale farmers who were supported to the tune of US$186 million.”

Biti said several options were being weighed by the government to ensure transparency and accountability, such as communities embarking on public works programmes and being paid in farming inputs, while another consideration was that inputs would be provided as low-cost loans, with repayments being made after the harvest.

Vulnerable groups, such as child-headed households, the elderly, and the disabled would also benefit from a US$66 million scheme to distribute inputs to them.

Too late

Renson Gasela, an agricultural expert and former head of GMB, told IRIN the distribution of agricultural inputs was being left too late. “To start with, the government has no capacity to distribute the inputs countrywide before the onset of the rainy season between September and October. All serious farmers should have their implements like seed, fertilizer and chemicals by June,” he said.

“Have the beneficiaries been identified? Is the maize seed and fertilizer available? If the implements can get to the farmers immediately then there would be a bit of hope. Unfortunately, it looks like the whole exercise is at the planning stage, which means inputs will get to fewer farmers very late, which will create more food shortages,” he warned.

“Experience has shown that small-scale farmers have very low yields per acre. So what needs to happen is that as many of them as possible should get seed and fertilizer, so that they produce enough for their families and extra to feed the nation, but based on the lack of movement in terms of distribution of inputs, if nothing is done now, then we are facing a disaster.”

No winds of change at the Grain Marketing Board

(IRIN) – The Zimbabwean government has announced new measures to boost local cereal purchases through its crisis-ridden Grain Marketing Board (GMB), but farmers are not convinced the plan will work.

In early June the finance ministry said it had secured US$100 million for a revolving fund to support the GMB’s procurement of rain through its countrywide depots.

The board had a long-standing monopoly on cereal purchases until March 2009, when private traders were allowed into the market – a response to the GMB’s inability pay decent prices to farmers, which fuelled a parallel market.

“The availability of resources to the GMB should facilitate timely payments to farmers for their maize deliveries,” said the finance ministry, adding that farmers would, as a result, be shielded from “exploitation by unscrupulous buyers”.

Good and bad news

A recent joint crop assessment report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) described the liberalization of the grain market as a “very positive development” that would encourage farmers to produce commercially and improve grain reserves.

The GMB has announced a floor price for grain of US$265, while private buyers are offering between US$180 and US$200. But the crop assessment report noted that the move was “largely ineffective at the moment, due to GMB’s inability to function with virtually no liquidity”. Local farmers are adopting a wait-and-see approach.

Denford Chimbwanda, president of the Grain and Cereal Producers Association (GCPA), told IRIN the GMB needed a far larger financial injection. “The move by the finance ministry to give assistance to the GMB is noble, but it is difficult to see how it will help the country – that money will buy less than 400,000 tons of cereals, a far cry from what we need in grain reserves.”

Zimbabwe requires about 1.7 million tons of cereals to adequately feed itself; this year, according to the FAO/WFP report, it harvested just 1.14 million tons, an increase of 130 percent from the previous disastrous season.

“As far as I know, the majority of our members and the subsistence farmers are not surrendering their produce to the GMB … They are still not confident that the GMB will pay them adequately, and are still smarting from the failure by the parastatal to pay them in past years,” said Chimbwanda.

No guarantees

Local television quoted a GMB spokesperson as saying on 30 June that the grain board would only be able to pay cash for the first 40 tons a farmer delivered. “That does not sound as though much has changed,” said Chimbwanda.

“There is no guarantee of timely payments for the remainder, so that farmers can be well prepared for the summer farming season that starts in September.” Better financing for the GMB was unlikely, he added, as the government was still battling to get funding from donors to run the country.

A coalition government of three rival political parties was formed earlier in 2009 to tackle Zimbabwe’s political and humanitarian crisis, but its efforts to convince the international community to come to the rescue with aid have had mixed results.

Chimbwanda said lack of confidence in the GMB would force farmers to sell to stock feed producers and dairy farmers, reducing the amount of cereals available to the public.

John Robertson, an economic consultant, told IRIN: “It is unclear why the GMB has decided to buy at US$265 when imports can be made at cheaper prices – this will force the grain utility to sell its products at unaffordable prices. In any case, I have spoken to a number of people in the milling industry and they … favour importing rather than buying locally.”

Robertson warned that the GMB might be tempted to use some of the money from government to bankroll its operations and offset its debts.

Initial forecasts by FAO/WFP estimate that about 2.8 million people will require food aid by March 2010, a substantial decrease from the 7 million beneficiaries during the March 2009 “lean season” – the month prior to the main harvest in April.

Zimbabwe: The grim reaper approaches

In the past two weeks the Zimbabwe economy has seen two really significant developments. The first is the total collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar and the second is the sharp deterioration in basic food supplies.

On Tuesday a local banker told me that the cost of money transactions in Zimbabwe dollars now exceeded the value of their transactions. Simply put that means if you are trading or shifting money in the form of the Zimbabwe domestic currency, you will be losing money even if you are charging interest and other charges related to the transactions that are involved.

So business here is now only possible if you work in a hard currency – the Rand or the US Dollar. This creates two other problems – how to obtain the hard currency in the first place and then, once you have the money, to use it without breaking the law which still prohibits such transactions.

For a small fortune you can secure a licence to operate in hard currency but even then the operating conditions are nearly impossible. So the reality is that most businesses have closed their doors or are now operating on a care and maintenance basis until better days – whenever that will be.

In the rural areas the position is even worse and people are now operating a barter economy or relying on the small remittances that come in from relatives in the Diaspora. If you cannot use either system, you are facing starvation.

On the food front the situation has deteriorated sharply in the past month. Humanitarian agencies have full warehouses but cannot get the food to the people who need it. The reasons are that the agencies cannot access cash for their operations – hard currency transactions are still illegal and the cash withdrawal limits and other restrictions imposed by the Reserve Bank are making local payments impossible – they cannot pay for hotels or staff salaries and cannot pay transporters to take the food to where it is needed.

But it goes beyond this, at the start of the year it was estimated that we needed 1,8 million tonnes of maize. Of this total the humanitarian agencies said they would try to supply 400 000 tonnes. The Zimbabwe government estimated maize production at 600 000 tonnes and that left a shortfall of 800 000 tonnes for importation.

So far all we can find evidence of are contracts for a total of 175 000 tonnes and even this meagre import programme seems to have spluttered to a halt. That leaves a total shortfall of 625 000 tonnes – possibly 800 000 tonnes because it is most unlikely that local production was 600 000 tonnes – most commentators say 425 000 tonnes.

This means that the shortfall is still probably 50 per cent of consumption and we still have 5 months to go to the end of the forecast supply period (April 2008 to March 2009). In October the donors fed 2 million people at the level of 15 kilograms of cereals a month per capita. In November they expect to go to 3,5 million people at a reduced rate of 10 kilos of cereals per capita. They plan to go to 5,5 million in January 2009 but at present they do not have the money or the supplies for that programme.

Remember that this is just the donor community completing what they committed themselves to at the start of the year and does not in any way alleviate the shortage in commercial supplies from the GMB. Therefore we can deduct from this in the absence of any information from official sources that food supplies are now down to critical levels.

If this is not addressed and soon, widespread starvation and deaths will be inevitable.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this is that the State has not admitted there is a problem and that they need help. No appeal has been made for help and no response is forthcoming from the authorities who have been approached to help rectify the problems with payments and the need to appeal for resources to help meet the needs in early 2009.

But the crisis goes beyond these basic problems – there is growing evidence that the Reserve Bank has used its power to loot the hard currency accounts in the banking system for its own purposes. This includes the accounts of the UN system and has led to a suspension of future transfers that will affect the tens of thousands of people with HIV/Aids who are on UN funded ARV’s.

If that was not bad enough, the Junta is running a programme called ‘Champion Farmers’. These are all those individuals in Zanu PF who have access to farming property, to draw on State funded inputs (fuel, seed, fertilizer and chemicals as well as farm equipment) to grow crops this summer. In a rush to take advantage of these offers (partially funded by a grant of R300 million from the South African government) Zanu PF thugs are harassing remaining commercial farmers and driving them off the land.

This whole programme is illegal and has been the subject of a lengthy appeal to the SADC Tribunal in Windhoek. The Tribunal has already ruled in favour of the farmers and is expected to knock the whole land reform exercise down at the end of November. That does not make any impression on these thugs and criminals.

This exercise includes a deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank and the Commissioner of Police. They are taking over farms where the commercial farmers have prepared land and secured some inputs and the new occupiers are then simply picking up where they left off and planting crops on land that does not belong to them using equipment looted from their owners.

All stocks of seed and fertilizer and all agricultural fuel is going to this programme leaving small scale farmers and 700 000 peasant farmers without these essential supplies. The result, tobacco plantings are down 50 per cent and cereal production is likely to fall below the level achieved last year.

So the suffering of the majority continues – ordinary men and women, children and the elderly without food and opportunity (95 per cent of teachers are not at work) and more particularly, without hope. The region has not even announced the date of the SADC/AU summit due in less than 10 days. – Politicsweb

Eddie Cross is the MP for Bulawayo South and Policy Coordinator for the MDC. This article first appeared on www.eddiecross.africanherd.com/