By Rutendo Matinyarare.
Why are Zimbabwe and most Southern African countries struggling to grow food? Is it because black people cannot farm, the infamous climate change, or is it purely mismanagement by the governments?
Well, as I illustrated in my article on cattle farming, desert regions like Chad, Sudan, Niger and Ethiopia are flourishing because they maintained their traditional forms of animal husbandry, while Southern African countries are failing because they adopted colonial methods that have attenuated their herds, reproduction and disease resistance due to hybridization.
Southern Africaners are very capable of producing sufficient food both during rainy periods and droughts to avert food insufficiency, and Zimbabweans are no exception as their ancestors for over a 1000yrs built and sustained the great Mutapa and Rozvi Empires by agriculture and mining through droughts. So what happened?
The problem is Southern African governments followed colonial blueprints and created dependency on foreign hybrids and GMOs, fertilizers, pesticides and machinery produced by their former colonizers, that they cannot maintain. This has destroyed our farmers’ competitive advantage of using reproductive traditional seeds, traditional farming practices and producing food at zero monetary value.
Traditional Bread Basket.
From 900 AD to the liberation war, our ancestors were able to produce enough food to feed our people and even export a great surplus while remaining with at least two seasons worth in the granary. During our liberation, our rural farmers were easily able to feed 6.5 million rural people from overcrowded barren reserve land and they also managed to feed the liberation fighters that Smith was hoping to starve by creating keeps to isolate them from our rural farmers.
No matter how hard Smith tried to starve our guerrilla fighters, he failed because the peasant rural farmers, despite living on overcrowded barren land, were able to grow enough food to become the food supply lines of the guerrillas through rain and drought. But how was this achieved?
The peasant farmer was able to grow a hectare of food to feed a family of 10, and when they grew more than a hectare, they were able to store enough for a year, share with guerrillas, sell some of the surplus to market, buy clothes and take their children to school at the cost of zero dollars.
The reason being, each and every family reused seeds saved over hundreds of years, deploying family labor, rudimentary irrigation canals, ox drawn ploughs that did not require huge capital outlay for machinery, replacement parts, huge maintenance or fuel and expensive irrigation equipment.
For fertilizer they used their own cow, chicken, goat and bat dung and manure. So this meant every rural family, irrespective or how poor it was, could produce its own food and food self-sufficiency had no cost and thus no barrier to entry.
To drought proof their crops, they grew traditional grasses and legumes that required less water. More critically their soils retained more water because they remained fertile because of living organisms in the soil that lived off the manure, infusing hummus into the soil which made it more coercive to retain moisture.
Another method used to mitigate water scarcity, increase soil fertility and control weeds, was multi-cropping or growing the awesome threesome that included millet which does not require lots of water, traditional beans which grew up the millet stems fixing nitrogen into the soil and pumpkin that gave ground cover to stop the land from drying quickly and stopped weeds from growing because they couldn’t get sunlight under the pumpkin leaves.
Some weeds like blackjack were kept on the peripheries of the fields to repel insects and pests, while swamps and forests were protected so that insects and bugs could flourish to prey on crop pests.
Additionally, the growing of crops adapted over decades in the area, helped the crops adapt disease resistance after decades of selective breeding for drought and disease resistance.
Through these methods, from Rhodesian times to the new Zimbabwe, rural farmers produced the majority of food eaten by the nation, from maize, peanuts, cotton, rapoko, millet, milk and meat.
This was not too different from the Mutapa empire era when our farmers even sold surplus food to Portuguese merchants as exports, so there was no need to import food even in droughts because our crops were drought tolerant, adapted to use less water over time and the granary stores catered for several years of drought.
It was when independent African governments were fooled into fixing what was not broken, that they discouraged our rural farmers from using traditional reproductive seeds and to exchange them for unproductive hybrid cash crop seeds, that these governments destroyed our food self-sufficiency.
These governments, in the name of science, promoted the growing of colonial cash crops like water thirsty and nutrition depleting maize, soya, sunflower and tobacco. This created mono-cultural farming which depletes nutrients in the soil, forcing farmers to use synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides like glyphosate, anthracene and neonicotinoids which kill living organisms in the soil, making soil looser, less fertile and reducing its ability to hold water.
The same monoculture also multiplies the concentration of the pests that feed on the mono-crops the nation concentrates on producing. The chemicals kill bees and other pollinators that depend on pollinating weeds and herbs that are being destroyed by chemical weedkillers, and with less diversity in pollinators, we have less yield.
On the financial side, where each rural family grew their hectare of millet, pumpkin and beans without spending any money; now they have to grow a hectare of water thirsty and nutrition depleting hybrid maize, at a cost from $320 to $380 a hectare to feed the same family of ten. And if they want to make money to buy clothes and take children to school they need to spend more to grow more hectares.
Due to this high cost of growing crops, over 80% of our rural families can no longer afford to grow food to feed their families any more because of the prohibitive cost. Their soils are less fertile, less cohesive and hold less water while their agricultural practices are no longer drought proof as their ancestors were when they grew more drought resistant traditional grasses.
To add to this, farmers also have less livestock as their less disease resistant hybrid cattle and boer goats have low immunity and continue to die of pest infections and drought because they are less robust.
As Southern African governments did with attenuating our cattle herd through hybridization with foreign inferior breeds, vaccination, medication and pen-feeding in the name of science, they also pushed our farming into the trap of dependency on foreign seeds, fertilizer and chemicals when they adopted colonial seeds and industrial farming practices to destroy our rural farmers in the name of science.
Some liberation movements unwisely decided to take advantage of this attenuation of rural families’ food self-sufficiency, to make them dependent on ruling parties for seeds to force them to vote for them. But what they didn’t realize is as rural farmers became dependent on their governments, their governments also became dependent of the foreign seed companies, fertilizer producers, donors and USAID to feed their people.
And sadly for these governments, many don’t have the capital to buy enough seeds, fertilizers, chemicals, machines and irrigation systems for all their farmers to produce enough, and as a result today, less than 35% of families that should be growing crops, are growing crops. Consequently, this has reduced the ratio of families dependent on producing their own food compared to before.
Nevertheless, when many of these governments are asked why they can’t feed their people, they lament global warming, the need for irrigation systems and mechanization, but what they won’t says is that they destroyed the traditional system of family farming, fostered a dependency on non-reproducing maize, which is not indigenous to Africa and some even criminalized the cultivation of our traditional small grains, and now less than one third of our rural homes are still producing food for themselves. As a result, these families are now dependent on commercial farmers, shops, government and foreign aid to feed themselves, unlike before when these families proudly produced their own food.
This self engineered dependency is the reason why Southern Africa is more food insecure than West, East, North Africa and desert regions where families in rural areas are still producing most of the traditional food that they eat.
Our governments in this region, entrenched neo-colonialism and dependency by commercializing and industrializing food production and encouraging all our farmers to grow nutrient depleting and water thirsty cash crops that are not indigenous to Africa.
The outcome was us turning our region into a captive market for fertilizers, seeds, chemicals, machines, parts and lubricants from foreign countries. A very an unsustainable foundation for food security and self-sufficiency.
This is an issue Hitler made a big deal about in his book Mein Kampf where he said that before Germany can think of being a superpower and highly industrialized nation, its economy must be founded on solid agriculture and food self-sufficiency.
Now, our governments in the region are captive of USAID, Monsanto, Sygenta, Dell, Limagrain, the subsidiary of Vilmorin, which is the biggest shareholder in Seedco. And with that power, these foreign entities can actually determine who governs our countries just by manipulating food supply.
What is even more disturbing is most African countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa, under pressure from the World Trade Organisation and treaties like UPOV (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants) to create laws that generally permit only foreign companies owned by their former colonizers to be the ones with the monopoly to develop, produce, and improve the seeds for our staple crops in the name of science. Talk about African ignorance being a billion-dollar industry.
Written by Rutendo Bereza Matinyarare, Chairman of ZASM.
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