Obert Chifamba Agri-Insight
LAST Tuesday, Government launched the Potato Value Chain Financing Facility at Parklands Farm in Norton, which is part of the country’s import substitution intervention strategies to boost productivity and profitability in the potato value chain and expand the country’s starch options.
Ordinarily, the launch that was done by the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Water, Fisheries and Rural Development, would have gone down as just one of the numerous efforts Government is making to transform agriculture and accelerate the attainment of Vision 2030 through the implementation of National Development Strategy 1.
The event just fitted seamlessly into the Government’s project with Kutsaga Research Station in which the duo has embarked on a seed potato multiplication programme from mini-tuber to commercial seed potato in 2020.
The programme is meant to ease the shortage of the seed potato, which has resulted in the country importing something in the region of 60 percent of its requirements mostly from neighbouring South Africa.
The shortage of seed potato was a direct result of a drop in production of seed from the Nyanga quarantine area.
For all intents and purposes, such imports have chewed up millions of dollars that under normal circumstances could have been deployed elsewhere in the economy and helped boost production and growth, hence the need to localise production of key inputs needed for seed potato production.
The end product, which is the mature potato will also be sold in processed state with an added value that will allow it to fetch more money than the amounts infested for its production.
The good part is that some of the processed products will be sold on the export market where they will fetch foreign currency for the country while jobs are also created in the process of adding value to the mature product.
The entire value chain will get a bite of the cake. The financing facility will eliminate capital constraints that have in recent times become most farmers’ biggest nemesis forcing many to either scale down production or completely abandon certain crops.
The programme will, on the one hand, also promote a diversification of starches and allow citizens to reduce over-reliance on one or two starches, especially maize.
This will take care of the health concerns of many citizens while bringing diversity to sources of income as well.
Besides addressing the above mentioned issues, the move will also leave farmers that are contracted to produce the seed economically sound given the high-value nature of seed potato on the market. It will also help reduce the chances of the country importing crop diseases from other countries that will in the long term cause problems.
The other good thing is that a lot of resource mobilisation and research work is also happening at Kutsaga’s laboratory to make sure that the material they produce is disease-free before they can distribute it to contracted farmers who will produce Generation 1 to Generation 3 potatoes from Generation 0 obtained from the laboratory.
The seed potato being produced under the Kutsaga and Government collaboration is virus free and there is no variation of genetics.
Above all, the process is fast, as it has the potential to yield over 15 million plantlets from one seed. Of course farmers with experience in potato production and who also happen to have the necessary infrastructure will in the interim benefit from the programme and are sure to spread the knowledge to others too.
The farmers are provided with the Generation 0 material and field inputs to ensure that they do not fault in producing a quality product while adequate funding is guaranteed from the Agricultural Finance Company (AFC) Holdings, which has bank-rolled the seed potato production programme.
Most of the farmers involved in the programme are concentrated in the Mazowe area where there are good soils for potato production.
One of the requirements is that the farmers must have virgin land, adequate water, electricity and other necessary infrastructure.
It is not a secret that such farmers will continue producing the seed potato even after the programme and the country will still be benefiting.
Meanwhile, Government will support the recently launched potato value-chain financing facility through a performance guarantee to ensure farmer-friendly interest rates and will ensure full recovery of any support given by the bank on the cost of inputs.
It is anchored on tripartite arrangements involving the bank, farmers and the off-takers.
Considering the perishability of potatoes, the facility will be accessed by farmers with contracts or off-take agreements with registered buyers including potato processors, fast-food outlets, supermarket chains, seed houses and distributors of fresh produce, which addresses market issues once and for all.
As an import substitution intervention measure, the facility targets to among other things, expand starch options for the country.
This is born out of the need to change dietary and consumption patterns among the people and move from being maize centric to embrace products such as spaghetti, macaroni, rice, chips and other products.
This is in line with the current activities on healthy eating, which have seen Government declaring potatoes a national strategic food security crop in 2012 in acknowledgement of their importance as a food crop.
Interestingly, the crop’s hectarage has been increasing since 2013 to the present with corresponding high yields of around 35 tonnes per hectare between 2013 and 2016 before taking a knock thereafter to between 20 and 25 tonnes per hectare.
It is good that the total annual potato production country-wide has been on a steady increase from about 400, 000 tonnes in the 2013/14 agricultural season to about 600, 000 tonnes in the 2019/20 agricultural season.
Such a development is good news to the potato industry bearing in mind that it has a strong multiplier effect, indirectly employing over 2,5 million people as marketing agents, transporters, processors, vendors, retailers, and exporters (Potato Value Chain Report, 2012).
There is increasing demand for potatoes in urban centres due to changes in consumption habits with approximately 65 percent of the potatoes supplied to urban centres being processed into chips in fast food restaurants and hotels.
At least three quarters of urban households are believed to be regular consumers of potatoes, accounting for five kilogrammes on average per adult per month.