Sydney Kawadza Senior Reporter
Government has reviewed downwards the hectarage set under Command Wheat to ease the pressure on farmers who are seized with harvesting maize planted under Command Agriculture, Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said.
Farmers had registered close to 61 000 hectares of land for wheat under Command Agriculture for this winter cropping season, with planting already underway.
The hectarage has been set at 43 000 hectares for the current winter season. The Command Agriculture programme, which started during the 2016-17 season when Government committed 400 000 hectares of maize to produce two million tonnes for national food security, has since been expanded to incorporate wheat and livestock.
The programme will now run beyond the envisaged three years. In an interview on the sidelines of his tour of the Grain Marketing Board depot in Chegutu on Tuesday, VP Mnangagwa said the wet season experienced in the summer had made migration from summer to winter cropping very difficult for most farmers.
“As we saw in Lion’s Den, we were shown lots of inputs for the winter wheat season, which have been left unused or uncollected as a result of farmers failing to remove their maize on time because of moisture in order for them to go into winter wheat,” he said.
“As a result, the winter wheat target has now been reduced because farmers are unable to move from summer to winter in good time.”
VP Mnangagwa is visiting GMB depots across Zimbabwe to assess maize deliveries. There were reports early this year, that GMB sites were in bad condition, leading Government to source for funds to upgrade and refurbish silos throughout the country.
“We are now assessing whether or not this has been achieved and also if there are any bottlenecks or challenges they are facing so that we can address those things,” said VP Mnangagwa.
“We will combine this, of course, with also the Command Wheat programme,” he said. “As we saw as we were flying around, most water bodies are getting utilised now. You see green around water bodies and this is what we want.”
VP Mnangagwa said Government would now speed up the acquisition of irrigation equipment so that most of the water bodies were utilised.
Government, he said, would soon roll out dryers at all GMB depots to assist farmers to dry their grain on the spot. Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development Minister Dr Joseph Made recently revealed that most farmers who participated in the Command Agriculture programme used long-season varieties with high yields, hence harvesting would start this month.
He said the main harvesting period for long-season varieties was the end of June going into full swing this month and in August. Dr Made urged farmers not to rush into harvesting their maize because of pressure to plant wheat.
The Command Agriculture programme is part of the Zim-Asset policy document under the Food Security and Nutrition Cluster.