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 hybridisation.

Southern Africans are very capable of producing sufficient food both during rain seasons and droughts to avert food insufficiency, and Zimbabweans are no exception as their ancestors, for over  1 000 years 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, fertilisers, pesticides and machinery produced by their former colonisers, 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 Breadbasket

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 struggle, 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 Ian Smith was hoping to starve by creating ‘keeps’ or ‘protected villages’ 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 the market, buy clothes and take their children to school at the cost of zero dollars.

The reason being, each and every family reused seed saved over hundreds of years, deploying family labour, rudimentary irrigation canals, ox-drawn ploughs that did not require a huge capital outlay for machinery, replacement parts, huge maintenance or fuel and expensive irrigation equipment. 

For fertiliser they used their own cow, chicken, goat and bat dung and manure. So this meant every rural family, irrespective of how poor it was, it 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 humus into the soil which made it more conducive 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 up quickly and stopped weeds from growing because they couldn’t get sunlight under the pumpkin leaves.

Feedback: zimbabweantisanctionsmovement.org/why-are-zimbab…