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FIXING up the storage capacity of the Grain Marketing Board, putting in schemes so farmers can access inputs, upgrading production methods, ensuring there is finance to buy all maize on offer and being very careful about short-term exports is now paying dividends.

Zimbabwe has a very variable climate, and this is likely to get even more variable. So we will have good rainy seasons, acceptable rainy seasons, so-so seasons and droughts. So in the better years, when we grow more than we eat, we need to stock up so that in the bad years, when we grow a bit less than we need, we can just hit the stockpile.

This does require Government intervention, since the private sector is rather bad at long-term planning and long-term investment into building stocks. 

Private companies tend to be wanting to buy what they need, “just in time” and even building a year of stock is difficult although possible.

The first recorded long-term Government planning of stocks comes from Genesis, where the foreign Joseph rose from slave to chief minister of pharaonic Egypt through careful foresight, ability to read the signs and in a series of seven good seasons managed to build huge stocks of grain that took Egypt, and his own family, through seven years when the Nile floods were dicey, a drought in East Africa and Ethiopia by the look of it. But it needed royal resources to do this.

The Second Republic, while willing to import if needed, feels very strongly that we should be feeding ourselves and has been working hard, assembling resources and helping the farmers to do this.

Zimbabweans eat around 2,2 million tonnes of maize a year and in recent years there has been a tendency to import some of this. Last year, with the major jump in the inputs schemes and the introduction of the new-look Pfumvudza schemes for small-scale farmers, plus of course a reasonable rainy season, one that started a bit late and was on the short side, but also one that saw rain almost every week while it lasted, we grew almost 2,7 million tonnes.

A lot of what is grown, more than 1 million tonnes, is eaten on the farms by the people who grow it if the season is good and most farmers can grow at least enough for their own families. 

So deliveries to the GMB and other contractors are a lot lower than the actual harvest. 

Efforts had already been made to renovate the GMB storage capacity, those large silo farms and the more temporary storage facilities. 

These had been allowed to run down, negating the huge investments made in the 1970s and 1980s to give the GMB decent capacity. 

Finance was found to ensure the GMB could buy every tonne delivered, with prompt payment, for the pre-set prices so the potential glut did not shove down prices as market forces kicked in.

This worked. Besides the normal trading, with the GMB buying from farmers and selling to millers and other customers, around 500 000 tonnes was set aside as what is termed the strategic grain reserve moved from being a name to being a lot of maize in storage, requiring a lot of investment funding.

Much of that reserve we will be eating over the next year.

The last harvest was just 1,8 million tonnes, but as President Mnangagwa noted this weekend, with what we had in store we will still be able to carry over 100 000 tonnes into the next season if we need it. 

There will be other complications arising from the dodgy rainy season. It must be noted that the total rainfall in the season that has just ended was not that bad; the problem was that besides the late start, and this seems now to be norm, with climate change and global warming probably the main cause, there was a long mid-season drought, before good rains returned for a late end to the season.

But yields did fall, unless farmers had supplementary irrigation and that is not common, and in the southern half of the country the stress of that long dry spell prevented many farmers from harvesting very much at all.

This means that a lot of families who normally grow all their own food are going to need help, either social payments so they can buy grain or mealie meal or rations of the actual maize. But that is totally separate from the total stocks on hand. 

Whether a good slice of the rural population need to buy or be given maize, joining most of the urban population who always have to buy mealie meal, is not the issue. 

The point is that the maize is there to sell or distribute. We stored enough in the good year to handle the poorer year. Considering how the Ukraine conflict is affecting global grain markets, that is important.

Funding this sort of effort needs money. Since food is so important it will be found. But the Government is now expecting the private sector, the millers, to go beyond “just in time” thinking and doing nothing more than sending the required number of trucks each week to a GMB store to collect their orders.

The new requirement is that millers have to fund in advance 40 percent of their requirements. There are many ways they can do this, and they have even been allowed to use free funds to import. 

But it seems more sensible for millers, oil-seed processors and others in agro-industry to follow the lead of the private tobacco sector and contract farmers.

They could also be allowed to work within the State system, with advance payments, to back the inputs schemes laid on by the Government, since the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development has created funding models for both small-scale and large-scale growers and has upgraded significantly the extension assistance given to farmers. 

Advance funding removes a lot of risk for the private sector, since however bad a season, a lot of grain is delivered and so advance payments would lead to guaranteed supplies. 

At the same time, the Government needs to press ahead with its own policy of boosting output of traditional grains, the ones indigenous to Africa and better able to cope with peculiar rainy seasons. 

That in turn will require assistance to process these grains and sell the meal. After four generations since the main switch to maize, most families are now unused to what people ate for a couple of thousand years. 

We also have to press ahead with the resurgence in our dam building and other irrigation capacity, and push ahead with the planned partial mechanisation of small holdings, mainly tillage, and the growth of the mechanised fleet on larger farms. 

The complex creation of the contours, cut offs and other systems that harvest water when rain falls often need mechanisation to create.

But already we seem back into the world of locally-grown food security, balancing the good years with the bad years, and so we have a solid base of what works to expand from. 

We have put in place the right policies and so the next step is to make these wider and involve more land and more people.