Reuters — South Africa must formally declare a national disaster for the government to release relief funds to help farmers through the worst drought in a century, the country’s largest grain producer group said last week.
While higher than expected January plantings saw Grain SA reduce its 2016 corn imports figure to 3.8 million tonnes from five million tonnes previously, late seeding has put young plants at high risk from extreme weather over their growth cycle.
With five out of nine provinces labelled disaster zones due to drought, the country now needs to acknowledge the situation nationally as farmers are starting to capitulate, said Grain SA chief ex-ecutive officer Jannie de Villiers.
Read Also
Cattle smuggling worsens outbreak in Mexico
Cattle being smuggled across Mexio’s southern border are making a screworm outbreak much more difficult to control.
“Our minister of agriculture is well informed but I think we need leadership to declare it a disaster so that the process can be triggered,” he said.
The federal government said it would not declare a national disaster saying it hoped late rains would improve the situation.
Whereas South Africa is wealthy enough to better tackle the problem of food shortages, the impact is looking particularly serious for Zimbabwe where 70 percent of the population still survives on farming.
In the village of Mafomoti, southern Zimbabwe, farmers have already lost cattle and crops in the severest drought to hit the nation in a quarter of a century. But the worst may be yet to come.
Midway through the farming season, the fields around the village are normally green at this time of the year but now they lie barren. Local people, who should be looking forward to the harvest in late March, are instead awaiting its failure and wondering how to make do with meagre supplies of food aid.
“It will not take us far so we will have to eat sparingly,” said Jesta Kugarira, 65. Apart from a few showers in mid-January, it hasn’t rained in Mafomoti since September and her corn, millet and sorghum crops have been destroyed.
Kugarira, who has 12 children and grandchildren aged between three and 24, said her family is surviving on one meal a day. She has just six kilograms of cereal, two kg of beans and some vegetable oil that she has received from the United Nations World Food Programme to keep them fed for a month.
The drought is likely to damage harvests across southern Africa and about 14 million people are at risk, the WFP says.
Zimbabwe’s economy has been struggling for five years to recover from a catastrophic recession that was marked by billion percent hyperinflation and widespread food shortages. Strained relations between president Robert Mugabe and aid donors such as the European Union have complicated matters.
Agriculture is critical to Zimbabwe’s economy, generating 30 per-cent of export earnings and contributing 19 percent to GDP. But a report by the government and international aid agencies last year said 16 percent of Zimbabwe’s population, which numbers 13 million, required food up to March 2016.
In South Africa, should a national disaster be declared, emergency relief funds would be released from the National Treasury to eligible farmers. However, any funding would probably come too late to secure the future of farmers on the brink of going bankrupt or selling their holdings, De Villiers said.
The Mpumalanga, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, Free State and North West provinces have been declared disaster zones for agriculture as the blistering drought sucks moisture from the soil and dam levels fall, causing a delay in planting crops for the crucial southern hemisphere summer season.
Farmers of cattle, sheep and goats have been urged by the government to cut the sizes of their herds as the drought has scorched grazing land and the 2016 corn harvest is expected to fall 25 percent from last year to 7.44 million tonnes.
De Villiers also signalled trouble ahead for the subsequent crop season, saying farmers would struggle to obtain crop finance after this year’s disaster and restrictions on insurance for lost income.
“Can the farmers plant again if they don’t have crop finance? If they can’t pay their debt the farmers are not going to plant next year even if it’s raining.”
