ARDA revamps irrigation schemes
THE Agricultural and Rural Development Authority (ARDA) is ready to revitalise all irrigation schemes countrywide as soon as the current rainy season ends, the organisation’s chairperson, Mr Ivan Crag, has said.
Mr Crag outlined plans to execute the ambitious programme to Sunday Mail Business on Wednesday.
“We are ready to come in and repair the non-working, faulty and abandoned irrigation schemes as soon as the rains go away. We want the nation to be able to adapt when the rains come in late or the rainy season becomes short.” he said.
Currently, 17 000 hectares are under irrigation and ARDA’s target is to reach 80,000ha in the shortest possible time. ARDA has the potential to contribute over 500,000 tonnes of grain to the strategic grain reserve, hence the need to increase efficiency on all the estates under its management.
Mr Craig said that of the 450 irrigation schemes managed by Arda, only 26 have been capacitated.
“So far we have managed to capacitate only 26 irrigation schemes by putting business development managers who are going to help in the planning, implementation and running of projects as a business at a rural level because we are looking at rural development,” he said.
The move is part of the Government enterprise’s operationalisation of Statutory Instrument 38 of 2021.
Among other things, the legal instrument makes it mandatory for irrigation-based projects to operate as business entities, in line with the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1), which identifies agriculture as one of the major economic enablers.
“In 2022, we are looking at increasing irrigation schemes going into the estates where we are going to carry our own operations and where we are going to say ‘why not farm on our own’. Definitely we are going to carry out our own farming. We are establishing centre pivots on those estates,” he said.
“We are also looking at recruiting more businesspeople so that we target as many irrigation scheme projects as possible. We are also looking at new dams that are being constructed so that we have additional irrigation schemes to make sure the communities benefits in a bigger way because rural development is a major mandate; we want people to improve their livelihoods.”
ARDA is also working hand in glove with Agriculture Marketing Authority (AMA) and ZimTrade to identify the markets for the crops.
This is done to avoid having different crops on a scheme that is not economically viable.
Instead, they are using a block system of having a uniform crop on a scheme because it helps the farmers negotiate discounted prices on inputs and helps in marketing their produce.
“We are saying how do we develop a rural farmer and rural projects and how do we industrialise them so that the farmer can at least be in a position to value add and realise a better return on every dollar that they are investing,” Mr Craig said.
Given the centrality of agriculture towards economic development, especially given that it contributes about 16 percent to the country’s Gross Domestic Product, Government has come up with many programmes to support the sector.
The major one is Pfumvudza that targets to boost household food security, followed by Command Agriculture that has seen A2 and large scale farmers producing enough food to feed the nation, in the process hiving off pressure on foreign currency demand.