Farming catalyst for Africa’s fast economic growth

PRESIDENT Mnangagwa has built his policies, and his reputation, on practical economic development that brings real benefit not just to the country as a whole, but which spreads those benefits among as many people as possible to the whole nation.

Speaking in Rome this week at the Italy-Africa Summit, the President hammered home once again his prescription for a prosperous Africa.

For a start the continent needs to feed itself, growing its own food and making sure that this food reaches every African, right down to the most isolated and most vulnerable so that everyone eats enough and has a reasonable diet.

This he sees as a necessary condition for accelerated growth, that the continent does not have to rely on the rest of the world for food. That has two benefits.

First vagaries in production chains caused by changing demands and the inevitable climate change, even with major efforts to move towards a carbon-neutral planet, will not cause hunger in Africa.

But, more positively, this food has to be grown by someone, and it makes more sense for African countries to pay African farmers to grow it, and earn a reasonable living doing so, than pay farmers outside the continent.

Money spent at home stays at home and those farmers with money in their pockets will be helping to drive the industrialisation of their continent, as they seek ever more goods or ever higher quality.

President Mnangagwa was not speaking as some theoretician. Since he took over the Presidency of Zimbabwe he has elevated agricultural production significantly through a complex and combined package of measures that make sure the right varieties of the right crops are grown, which implies a lot of research in both private and public sectors.

Then the farmers need to use the best methods of farming, and the Second Republic has revolutionised farming practices, embracing the new conservation farming methods and dumping systems imported from outside, preferring to see what Zimbabwean research workers can come up with when told to figure out the best sustainable practices to create higher productivity.

So we have seen a more than fourfold rise in the value of farming output in a very few years, in both food crops and cash crops.

The President did note that Zimbabwean farmers, with decent backing, had made their country self-sufficient in wheat, which is not common in Africa.

He did not labour the point that wheat production only started in 1966 and under the UDI regime and the earlier post-independent efforts had never come very close to self-sufficiency, while his Government had in four seasons pulled off that feat.

In fact most crops have achieved record production levels, which now justifies the land reform of more than 20 years ago as the resettled farmers use the land more productively.

But, as the President also noted, this massive jump in production has not come cheap.

The Government has spent more than US$2 billion since 2020 on building dams, drilling boreholes, and commissioning irrigation infrastructure, so the farmers have the water desperately needed for their operations.

And this is a continuing programme.

Generally, the Government has around five major dams at some stage of construction, and as each one reaches completion, fills and the irrigation infrastructure is added so that Zinwa can start selling the water to farmers and urban consumers, the construction engineers move to the next site on the list.

We are unlikely to ever finish building dams and putting in irrigation. The target is to get most of our farming access to irrigation, either complete irrigation as is needed for wheat and some other crops, or more widely supplementary irrigation to cope with late season starts, long dry spells, and other problems that are becoming ever more common with climate change.

El Ninos affect different parts of the world in different ways, either with floods or droughts. Southern Africa is unfortunately in a zone where an El Nino usually means lower rainfall, and we are usually a bit tight on water supplies to start with. So we need the dams and irrigation.

El Ninos are caused by currents in the Pacific Ocean, and a warmer planet will make them more common. So we need to be prepared and keep spending money.

Another climate change problem appears to be more cyclones in the southeast Indian Ocean. These are also driven by higher surface temperatures on the sea.

So we need to build our capacity, already significantly better than before the Second Republic, to cope with these, and while we are doing that to make sure the extra rain a cyclone might bring gets trapped in the dams, helping to build the reserves.

Lake Mutirikwi, for example, was designed to catch the cyclone that appeared in its basin on average every decade, and then release this extra water over several years.

But this continual investment into infrastructure requires a lot of money and also means that those who use water have to buy it, which at least means they will not be wasting water, will be making every drop count, and will be working out how many dollars profit they can make from each dollar spent on irrigation.

But part of the Zimbabwean revolution is to get our farmers to start keeping the accounts and doing the calculations.

President Mnangagwa has in other forums pressed his Pfumvudza concept as a model. This started with taking the small-scale producers, who dominate rural Africa, and seeing them as a resource rather than a cost.

What Zimbabwe found was that by ensuring they were using the best farming methods, had access to inputs, and access to decent advice, they could produce the food, not just for themselves, but also for the cities.

This conversion of small-scale producers to small-scale commercial farmers is what is driving rural development in Zimbabwe, which is why that is obviously in the Agriculture Ministry, and moving a huge block of Zimbabweans into the middle-income groups. More is promised as they get more access to mechanisation and irrigation.

This will see another rural revolution. At the moment a majority of Zimbabweans earn their living as farmers or in farming families. As rural wealth rises and the extra value remains spread across the whole farming population, there will be changes.

For a start, there will be more people earning their living providing services to farmers, from mechanics to suppliers of building materials and hardware, and more earning their living processing products from the farms.

In the end, intensive farming might well produce a third of our national wealth, even when farmers are a minority of the population although by growing our food and providing so many industrial and artisanal raw materials they support a majority.

Italy, interestingly, provides a good example.

Land reform there triggered the rural revolution many decades ago, and your average Italian rural area produces a wide range of specialised food products, some of which are counted as luxury items when exported.

That sort of model is easy to adapt to Africa, making sure land is properly farmed but also ensuring that the value of what is farmed and then processed is continually rising.