Let’s now aim at self-sufficiency in rice

ZIMBABWE imports almost all its rice, although a small amount is grown in the country largely of the African species, and rice has been estimated as the eighth largest commodity import.

While almost all rice on sale in shops and supermarkets comes from Zimbabwean companies, the local value is almost all in packaging of bulk imports, although there is some processing of brown rice imports into the polished white rice that most consumers prefer. But generally the Zimbabwean physical content of a bag of rice is just the plastic bag.

Globally there are just two species of rice grown, although there are many varieties of both. Most rice is Asian rice, domesticated at least 8 200 years ago and perhaps as long as 13 500 years ago.

Over the millennia, a wide range of varieties have been developed and these are the primary grain in the diets of perhaps half the world’s population.

African rice is quite a different species, but still related, domesticated in West Africa along the Niger river around 3 000 years ago. There has been less time to develop the domesticated species by natural selection, although there are many varieties including a very long-stemmed variety for deeper water. Taste varies with the African variety generally considered to have a nuttier flavour.

Yields are lower for African rice, although part of this results from incomplete domestication with a looser head, so more grain is lost in harvest, and partly from the more brittle grain so more rice is broken.

Harvesting care can limit the losses, and then yields are much closer to Asian rice yields. But even in West African communities that have relied on rice for generations, Asian rice now dominates production with around 80 percent of the total.

Efforts have been made to hybridise Asian and African species, to gain the greater drought resistance and better disease resistance of African rice and the higher yields of Asian rice and perhaps the Asian taste.

Most were unsuccessful or infertile, as they are different species, but in the last few years a new set of hybrids, the New Rice for Africa or Nerica strains, have been developed that combine the best of both.

It is this that Japan is keen to see introduced to Zimbabwe, with Ambassador Yamanaka Shinichi, announcing that a Japanese team of experts will be coming to Zimbabwe to see how joint production can be started and this new strain can become a major commercial crop.

These efforts should be backed, although we could also increase our tiny production of the African rice that has been around for many decades and must have become acclimatised. It might be under one percent of what we eat, but it is there and, as with so many crops, the more variety the better.

While the less than 1 000 tonnes of African rice grown in Zimbabwe has been grown on wetlands in areas of high rainfall by small-scale producers, major production of Nerica strains to start replacing the huge imports of Asian rice will require a quite different approach, of an irrigated crop.

But we have been here before. Up to 1965 just about all Zimbabwean wheat and flour was imported, the odd hectare of wheat grown in the country being a miniscule fraction of the total and generally considered not a worthwhile crop.

We were told the climate was unsuitable and the disease risks too high. Well they were for a dryland summer crop, and the other options were not considered. That changed at UDI and from 1966, a determined attempt of growing irrigated winter wheat was initiated, small at first, but successful and extended until more than half of local demand was met.

But it was only the determined efforts of the Second Republic three years ago that saw Zimbabwe finally achieve self-sufficiency in 2022 and a respectable surplus last year.

State intervention was needed from the very beginning, but it was only the combination of land reform and State intervention and State-contracts that finally made the country self-sufficient with pricing set to accommodate the irrigation costs.

This was largely paying Zimbabwean farmers a bit more than world prices, but taking this extra payment out of the transport costs that no longer applied.

In other words, the potential saving on landed costs was paid to the farmers so they could buy water and electricity to grow the crop under 100 percent irrigation.

Presumably the same economic models would apply to Nerica production in Zimbabwe, and perhaps some of the winter irrigation potential that is used for wheat could be extended to rice production in summer.

But summer irrigation, or at least summer supplementary irrigation, will be increasingly needed for maize and tobacco crops as the climate changes. So there is competition for irrigation resources.

However, we have been building large dams away from some of the traditional cropping areas, such as Tokwe Mukosi in the Lowveld, the largest interior dam where the irrigation potential has yet to be fully used, and that opens the opportunity for irrigated rice.

In any case, Nerica strains were developed for dryland rice production, although it is likely some irrigation will be needed, and so be grown more widely.

But more importantly, the wheat experiments in the late 1960s and the dramatic expansion under the Second Republic, showed that we can maintain production of our older crops and introduce a new crop, and there is no reason to suppose that rice cannot be another new crop.

It seems daft that Zimbabwe, with its wide range of soils and climate zones, should import food, any food, and the new availability of what looks like a suitable rice variety could end another food import, so we should now be doing the local testing and research and then the planning to make sure we take advantage of what is available, and on offer from Japan, and perform another of our now-routine agricultural miracles.