SIMPLE village wisdom has impacted on the continued growth of Zimbabwe’s agricultural revolution which has seen the country producing one of its best wheat harvests and ensure that the nation becomes food secure.
This was revealed by President Mnangagwa during his presentation at the Dakar II Feed Africa Summit where he was presenting on Zimbabwe’s vision for growth in agriculture, regional integration, public-private partnerships, and scaling up success stories. President Mnangagwa said village philosophy entails that a country must be ruled and developed by the people of that country.
“In Zimbabwe we had the problem of food insecurity and we said, how much food do we want in a year to feed our nation and the figure we got was 2 million metric tonnes of grain. So we said, because there is climate change, how many hectares of land can we put under irrigation to produce 2 million-plus metric tonnes to feed the nation and we determined how much yield does a hectare have hence we knew the figures and we did that and we are now food secure.
“Secondly we have been importing our wheat from Ukraine and fertiliser from Russia, now that side is problematic. We thus decided to say we need about 240 000 metric tonnes of wheat, so how much hectares do we need under irrigation to grow wheat and we calculated and put that number under wheat and we are now wheat sufficient and we believe next season we will be able to export wheat,” said the President.
He further revealed that to solve the fertiliser problem, the country also explored the option of producing its own fertiliser after noting that Zimbabwe has all the by-products for fertiliser production.
“Also it is necessary that we harvest water and we have a programme where we are constructing dams in all our eight agricultural provinces and making sure we irrigate enough land to feed the nation,” said President Mnangagwa.
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