Thu, 08 Feb 2018 10:38:05 +0000
By ANDREW MUKOMA
THE Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI) has predicted that it will be difficult for the country to record a bumper harvest this year.
IAPRI executive director Chance Kabaghe said this was because of the prolonged drought, late distribution of supplies, army worms and stalk borers experienced in in some parts of the country.
In an interview with the Daily Nation in Livingstone, Mr. Kabaghe said that most parts of the country had been hit by prolonged drought including Lusaka, Western, Southern and parts of Eastern provinces.
“We started the Farmer Input Support Programme very late and as we are talking right now, there are farmers who are still queuing for the inputs…the second challenge was the issue of rains. As you know January is a critical month to the farming sector but unfortunately, that is the time we were hit by prolonged droughts in some parts of the country like Lusaka, Southern, Western and some parts of Eastern Province,” he said.
“Another issue was the problem of the stalk borer which ravaged some fields in certain areas. However, with the rains that we have started receiving, I still feel we can still have some crops,” Mr. Kabaghe said.
“I am very sure that we will have very low yield and harvest compared to last year. We are just lucky that the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) still has enough maize in stock,” he said.
Mr. Kabaghe further predicted that the country would also have an addition crop to eat from what will be harvested in Northern, Muchinga, Luapula and Copperbelt.
“But if the harvest becomes very poor, I still believe that some commercial and big farmers who use irrigation can commit part of their land to grow maize which will be ready in winter and we will have the crop to cater for September and October,” he said.
“Going forward, government needs to make sure that we start investing in irrigation and move away from the rainfall water dependency which is the case with most of the small scale farmers,” he said.
He observed that government should further focus on constructing more dams and make them operational to add to the already existing dams especially in drought-prone areas.
