ZIMBABWE and the sub-region are currently faced with serious challenges of food shortages largely blamed on climate change.
For the so-called educated, the climate change debate has occupied the agendas of many local, regional and international workshops and conferences and kilometres of newspaper space dedicated to it in recent years.
This year, however, even those who cannot read the papers or have no radios and television sets through which to follow the debates, have become painfully aware of the phenomenon generally called climate change.
This current cropping season has shown people what scientists call crops at ‘permanent wilting point’.
This is a situation where crops lose water through the leaves (transpiration) so fast the roots cannot replenish it quickly enough.
The plant leaves wilt (kusvava).
Under normal circumstances, the leaves regain their full shapes at night when root uptake of water matches loss through the leaves.
This season however, we observe that most crops remain wilted even throughout the night when it is much cooler and there is little evaporation from the leaves.
This state is called ‘permanent wilting point’.
There is not enough water in the soil for root uptake!
It is very difficult for a crop to recover from a permanent wilting status.
The soil will need to be wetted thoroughly.
Light continuous rain over several days with mostly overcast skies or at least limited periods of hot sunshine will be required for crop recovery.
Where the crop has remained in a permanent wilting state for many days, plant cells will have collapsed and recovery may be impossible.
One of many strategies to fight climate change is to carefully select drought-tolerant crop varieties.
Crops like sorghum, pearl millet and finger millet have excellent tolerance to wilting and will recover and grow new leaves and tillers (branches) that will tassel and yield grain with the return of rains.
This is why these crops are recommended in areas where rainfall is low and erratic.
Generally, maize has low survival potential under prolonged wilting conditions. Drought-tolerant varieties have been developed by research scientists in Zimbabwe.
Many are being marketed, but their performance has yet to be widely appreciated by small-holder farmers.
Many legume crops have been shown to have drought-tolerance characteristics.
In the 2001/2 drought year, during research and promotion trials in Buhera District, we observed that soyabean that had been inoculated with rhizobium (nitrogen fixing nodule bacteria) survived the severe drought, flowered and yielded some grain when the rains returned.
All the maize crops had since dried up.
Tolerance to drought stress appeared to be linked to adequate nitrogen supplied by the nodule bacteria rhizobium.
Cowpeas, groundnuts and roundnuts also have excellent drought-tolerance capacity, hence their being recommended in drier cropping environments.
At germination, these legume crops send down a long tap root that stays with the soil moisture front as at it recedes downwards.
These indigenous legumes also have large effective nitrogen fixing nodules which supply the plant with nitrogen fertiliser.
Researchers have found this nitrogen to be an important requirement for a plant to tolerate moisture stress.
We must hasten to point out that the nitrogen must only be applied when plants have adequate moisture, not when they are wilting.
Even after heavy rains, one must wait until the plants to be top-dressed with nitrogen fertilizer are no longer wilted.
A few weeks back, one farm manager, after a heavy downpour measuring 20 mm of rain on a rain gauge, ordered the workers to apply ammonium nitrate top dressing to a tasseling, but wilting maize crop.
It was like adding salt, the crop never recovered.
Another human factor failing!
But to return to our topic: Tackling food insecurity.
It is clear that even with limited rains, careful choice of crops can avert hunger and starvation.
There has been a general call on farmers to grow small grains such as sorghum and pearl millet and pulses such as cowpeas.
Farmers have generally ignored such calls preferring the easy-to-process maize.
Last weekend we travelled to Pfura District, Mt Darwin, all the way to Mukumbura to visit relatives.
The sight of wilting and dying maize in field after field was so depressing.
This scenario was repeated all the way from the Doma area in Makonde District through Raffingora in Zvimba North, to Mvurwi, Concession, Bindura, Mt Darwin, Dotito and over the Mamvuradona Mountains to Chisecha near the Mukumbura border post.
Maize dominated in all the areas we passed through and was severely moisture-stressed.
Whereas in most years the people in Mt Darwin and towards the border have often planted sorghum, this time we saw only three fields with sorghum which seemed to be doing well despite the searing heat.
In one other field there was a maturing cowpea crop that seemed to be immune to the stress affecting maize crops in neighbouring fields.
We wondered what difference it would have made if most of these farmers had planted small grains and legumes.
We also saw some groundnuts showing moisture stress, but not as severely as on the maize.
These were casual observations as we drove along, but the potential to avert total hunger through judicious choice of crop varieties did not escape us.
When there is hunger and food shortages as now, we become confronted with a national crisis.
One would want economic planners and agriculturalists to deliberately target the promotion of drought-tolerant crops.
These efforts must go beyond policy pronouncements to deploy research and extension personnel on the ground to provide the requisite technical and advisory support to make things happen.
We cannot leave matters of national food and nutrition security to the whims and fortunes of individual, often incapacitated, farmers.
The energies that our Government is expending to mobilise resources to import food to avert hunger and starvation must at the appropriate time be matched with efforts to grow local capacity to produce our own food.
The technologies and expertise are available.
We need to mobilise resources and the necessary political will to put our money where our mouths are; that is to invest in developing local capacity for food and nutrition independence long term.
People have talked of command agriculture.
I think it is now time for Government, as part of its strategic planning, to direct that every farmer devotes a certain proportion of his/her land to strategic crops suitable for the agro-climate of the area.
This should be a national requirement.
Nutrition security must be accorded the highest priority in our national plans.