Deputy Agriculture Minister Sylvester Nguni, in a rare admission of failures in the nation’s land redistribution program, said many new farmers who received land lacked the expertise to produce crops on what he called a "commercial and even subsistence level," The Herald reported.

Even farmers with adequate resources still failed to produce "meaningful" crops, Nguni said.

Despite good seasonal rains, Nguni predicted the harvest beginning around April would produce half of what had been expected.

"The truth is, most crops have adversely taken the brunt of the shortage of fertilizers, and this has inevitably slashed the yields by about 50 percent," he said.

In some areas where fertilizers were used, above–average rainfall had leached out crop nutrients and herbicides.

He said many new farmers lacked training and experience. And the government’s Agricultural Research and Extension department (AREX), which provides trainers and advisers, was understaffed and lacked transport and gasoline as the country suffers its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980.

President Robert Mugabe has insisted his land redistribution program, begun in 2000, was intended to correct colonial era imbalances in ownership.

Critics say, however, that prime farms were allocated to ruling party cronies, judges, city business owners, government supporters and law–enforcement officials with no farming experience.

The central bank governor, Gideon Gono, in October criticized some new farmers for using their land only as "weekend picnic venues." He also castigated some for allegedly using agricultural loans to buy luxury off–road vehicles for private use and profiteering by selling the subsidized gasoline available to resettled farmers at black–market prices that were inflated tenfold.

Nguni was receiving a donation of 28 bicycles for AREX experts, according to The Herald, a government mouthpiece. It said the department now employed some 3,000 extension officers, about half the 6,000 it needed countrywide.

Last year Zimbabwe, once a regional breadbasket, produced about 800,000 tons of corn, the staple food. The country consumes around 1.8 million tons a year. Before the chaotic and often violent seizures of thousands of white–owned commercial farms began in 2000, food surpluses were exported.

Last week, the state–run Tobacco Industry Marketing Board predicted a 50–percent drop in production estimates for the main, hard currency–earning crops this year, citing late and inadequate loans to growers and shortages of fertilizer, chemicals and gasoline.

Official inflation in the crumbling economy soared last month to 613 percent, one of the highest rates in the world, as the United Nations food agency distributed emergency food aid to more than 3 million people facing acute hard currency and food shortages.

This is cache, read story here

login or register to post comments