Dakar (New Ziana) – Zimbabwe has almost become food self-sufficient after government adopted a deliberate policy of supporting the agriculture sector financially, and through provision of farming inputs, President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said.
Addressing an African food summit here, he said the policy was based on old age village wisdom of eating what one kills.
“A country must eat what it kills, that is village wisdom. In Zimbabwe, we had problems of food insecurity, and we said how much food do we want per year to feed our country? We know we wanted about two million metric tonnes of grain.
“So, we said because there is climate change, how many hectares of land can we put under irrigation to produce the two million tonnes to feed the nation. Thats, we have done, and we are now food secure,” he told the summit, attended by dozens other African leaders.
“Secondly, we have been importing our wheat from Ukraine, our fertiliser from Russia – now that side is problematic. So, we decided to say we need about 240 000 metric tonnes of wheat, so how many hectares do we put under irrigation to grow wheat and we calculated and put that number of hectares under wheat.
“We are now wheat sufficient, and we believe that next season we should be able to export wheat,” President Mnangagwa said.
In addition to funding agriculture, and capacitating farmers with farming inputs, the government also resettled hundreds of thousands of formerly landless blacks to boast production, and economically empower them.
He said the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war had disrupted food supplies worldwide, and this should be a lessen to African countries in particular to strive to become food self-sufficient.
The two countries combined account for nearly 30 percent of global wheat exports, but this has been severely disrupted by the war, causing a spike in prices.
The summit is running under the theme: “Feed Africa: Food for Sovereignty and Resilience”. Zimbabwe is implementing food security strategies that are growing Africa’s confidence to work to feed itself.
New Ziana
