By Professor Sheunesu Mpepereki

THE land reform programme has successfully moved land, the chief means of production from the 4 500 minority settler colonial whites into the hands of over 300 000 indigenous black families.
This land ownership is the first and main element in the struggle to consolidate our independence.
Owning land is a necessary but not sufficient condition to ensure agricultural productivity.
Financial resources are essential. But as the people say, ‘mari hairimi, chinorima vanhu’ or ‘imali kayilimi, kulima abantu’.
Financial resources are a necessary but not sufficient condition to ensure agricultural productivity.
For people to produce agricultural products they need knowledge and skills.
They need to know what to grow and how to grow it; what livestock to raise and how to raise it.
No amount of money can increase productivity if the human capital lacks the requisite skills and knowhow.
Research must be pursued to find the most efficient ways of doing agricultural business in the broadest sense.
Agricultural experts must provide the nation with knowledge on how to match agricultural enterprise to the agro-climatic conditions prevailing in each particular region.
Appropriate technologies must be deployed to facilitate agricultural enterprises.
For example, food insecurity on the back of crop failure due to poor rains must be part of history as crop irrigation becomes routine.
Or solve the problem by growing crops less demanding of water.
The agricultural enterprise must be conducted in a manner that is environmentally sustainable, allowing present and future generations to continue to draw sustenance from the same God-given natural resource base.
This calls for natural resource conservation by all citizens where environmental stewardship becomes everybody’s business.
Farmers require competent and knowledgeable extension and technical advisory services.
We need to invest in imparting skills and knowledge in order to build the human capital base needed to translate our vision for food and nutrition, security and economic development into reality.
In this series on agriculture we shall examine various options for moving Zimbabwean agriculture forward.
This series shall also dwell on soyabean technologies and share our experiences with readers.
Today we shall look at cash crops. There are two categories: food cash crops and non-food cash crops.
Traditionally maize is our best example of a food cash crop. But in this basket we can place grain legumes such as soyabean, groundnuts and even sugar beans and cowpeas (nyemba).
Small grains that include sorghum (mafunde/amabele), pearl millet (mhunga/inyauti) and finger millet (rukweza/upoko) also qualify as food cash crops.
Markets for small grains are poorly developed partly because production volumes are low and prices unpredictable.
Recent Government policy support has involved giving small grains the same producer price as maize to stimulate production.
Production picked up in 2009/10 but the stocks have until recently remained in GMB stores with little uptake from millers or ordinary citizens.
We shall dedicate a whole article to the issue of small grains because they are a potential major component of our food and nutrition security base.
Let us look at the non-food cash crops.
In this category we place tobacco and to some extent cotton. In the immediate past season thousands of farmers abandoned maize production to go into tobacco.
Many failed to swim across while the lucky ones discovered fortunes unimaginable! Lack of knowledge, inexperience and lack of adequate resources all connived as it were to deny these aspiring tobacco farmers the sweet fruits of the golden leaf.
Tobacco has become the proverbial ‘greener pasture’ for farmers large and small.
But some analysts have speculated that tobacco could turn out to be a major threat to local food security.
This sounds far-fetched given the huge inflows of foreign currency from tobacco sales that boost the GDP.
But perhaps we need to pause and look a little closer at tobacco.
Tobacco is a non-edible leaf crop.
It is inputs-intensive and requires a high level of skilled management. As more land is put under tobacco, less is put under food crops.
In some cases the very best lands are being put under tobacco.
The traditional practice was to grow maize on the better lands and in the home fields closer to homesteads.
Tobacco was targeted for sandy low fertility soils.
In the immediate past season (2011/12), even elderly women have put their home fields under tobacco, remaining with virtually no patch of maize even just for some green mealies for roasting.
The recent reports that farmers in Buhera, Matabeleland and Gokwe have registered to grow tobacco must send alarm bells ringing among those concerned with Zimbabwe’s food security.
Basal and top- dressing fertilisers and the myriad of other required chemicals were unavailable or unaffordable to most of the aspiring new tobacco farmers this past season.
Low yields and poor quality leaf were common challenges. Because these farmers committed their good pieces of land to tobacco, maize production declined significantly.
Because maize is not locally available it means even those who earned some money from tobacco sales also face hunger and starvation as they cannot access food to buy.
Some people have speculated on the existence of a grand plan by the country’s detractors to provide huge sums for contract tobacco farming to lure farmers from growing food security crops.
The resultant hunger and starvation were then meant to induce people to rebel against ZANU PF.
The strategy almost worked in 2008 but failed dismally in the 2013 elections.
But Zimbabwe’s enemies will continue to devise new strategies to derail our revolution.
But the lessons, however, are clear: crop diversification away from staple crops must be controlled; it poses a threat to national security.
Clearly Government needs to play a leadership role in determining the overall thrust of cropping programmes to ensure that food and cash crops constitute the majority of crops grown by farmers.
Market forces must not be allowed to dictate what crops are grown. We need to think through our strategies and operate outside the box. Agriculture is no longer business as usual.