K3.2 trillion spent on maize purchasing

Government, through the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) has spent K3.2 trillion on purchasing maize and transportation it during the 2011-2012 crop marketing season.

Agriculture and Cooperatives Minister Emmanuel Chenda said K2.2 trillion was spent on maize purchasing alone while K1 trillion has been spent on transporting the commodity to safer places.

Mr. Chenda said this amount was unprecedented considering the low productivity by the small scale farmers in the country.

He disclosed this in Solwezi at the weekend during a briefing with Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock provincial heads of departments.

Mr. Chenda said due to flaws in the FRA marketing system, government has ended up huge sums of money on maize purchasing alone.

He said traders and other players on the market have taken advantage of the lucrative price which FRA was offering to import maize from neighbouring countries which they later sold to the agency.

Mr. Chenda said government was in the process of reviewing FRA operations aimed at reverting to its original mandate of being a strategic reserve.

And Mr. Chenda said government was still facing the challenge of finding market for over one million tonnes of maize which is still laying at the depots.

He said his ministry was working hard to find market within and outside the country so that space is created for this year’s crop marketing season.

Meanwhile, Mr. Chenda said the only way of ensuring food security and poverty reduction was to diversify the agriculture sector.

He said government was currently revising the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) saying it has been hijacked by politicians, civil servants and traders.

Mr. Chenda said the revised FISP will include other crops in addition to maize.

He said the crops that will be included on the FISP are cotton, beans and groundnuts.

He said the highly publicized bumper harvests were not as result of farmers’ increased productivity but because of the increase in the number of beneficiaries.

And speaking after he toured selected fields under the Kansanshi mine conservation farming project, Mr. Chenda commended the mine for the efforts it was making to helping farmers increase their productivity.

“We have come and seen for ourselves how you are trying to be friends of farmers by teaching them new methods of farming in particular conservation farming,” Mr. Chenda said.

He said the Kansanshi conservation farming project will help in job creation, poverty reduction and putting money in farmers’ pockets.

Mr. Chenda said the PF manifesto has emphasized on the need to diversify the agriculture sector as it was the only sustainable way of reducing poverty.

The minister said conservation farming will play an important role in fulfilling the diversification programme of the PF government.

He said currently, small scale farmers that use conventional methods were producing two tonnes of maize per hectare while those practicing conservation farming were producing about five tonnes.

Mr. Chenda also bemoaned the low livestock production in the district and urged Kansanshi mine to speed up their plans of diversifying to livestock.

He assured Kansanshi mine of continued government’s support.

Meanwhile, Director of Agriculture, Mary Chipili, has called on stakeholders involved in conservation farming to collaborate with the ministry in the designing of messages targeted at farmers.

Mrs. Chipili said at the moment, organizations that promote conservation farming have different messages which she said was confusing the small scale farmers.

She said the harmonization of conservation farming messages were underway so that the country can have one message for farmers.

And speaking after the minister’s tour of the fields, Kansanshi Mine Public Relations Manager Godfrey Msiska pledged the mine’s continued support to the agriculture sector.

Mr. Msiska said the mine was alive to the fact that not all the local people can be employed by the mine hence the need to empower them through agriculture.

ZANIS