Zambians want to hear govt’s plans on mitigating drought effects

By Daily Revelation Editor

The drought the country has experienced will surely have serious ramifications this year in terms of food security, power generation and sanitation among several other areas too numerous to mention.

Despite the drought not affecting the entire country, it has hit out on areas where the country enjoys massive productivity in terms of maize and other food crops. This entails that the farmers who expended their hard earned cash and energies on planting the crops have already seen their investment go to waste, and with that the expected return from the anticipated produce. This already spells trouble in terms of expected household income and with that risks on worsening poverty.

The millions of Dollars the government spent on farming inputs through ventures such as the FISP programme will also go to waste as the droughts hit the country after the people had already planted and their plants were making promising growth in the fields.

And on account of the dry spells, energy generation is also bound to be affected in the country, and with that effects such load shedding and increased outages. Closely connected to that is the issue of sanitation as on account of poor rains, we are likely to see increased shortages in water supply, leading to people going to search for fresh water. The country is also likely to experience drying boreholes as the underground water levels recede.

All this will compound the worsening living standards in the country as effects on energy generation alone are bound to have ripple effects in terms of production in the country. Everything will converge to make life a little harder for Zambia. Low agricultural production will entail that the already high mealie meal prices going at over K300 per 25 kg bag will skyrocket further. As we speak there is already talk of the yellow maize which was once widely consumed in this country in the early 1990s slowly creeping onto the market.

The same Zambia which has been exporting especially the maize and mealie meal commodities to the other countries will likely be on the back foot in search of the commodities it has been exporting to other countries at lucrative prices. We hope the tacit sentiments we are beginning to get from the government that genetically modified organisms are safe for human consumption are not the first step towards preparing Zambians to accept the consumption of GMOs in the country. Regardless of the challenges, this is not food to encourage people to consume.

The problems Zambia is going through need immediate planning and action from the government. People want to hear for instance on what measures the administration has put in place to mitigate challenges on energy demands. Zambians also want to hear that there has been a true ban, ban as in the real sense, on the export of maize and mealie meal from Zambia in anticipation of the low production occasioned mostly by poor rains.

Going forward, there are regions in the country which have been known to be drought prone and those which receive rains no matter the season or climatic condition obtaining at any particular time. How about encouraging increased production in those regions which receive good rains? And there should be more investment generally in terms of increasing none rain fed agriculture in the country.

During Levy Mwanawasa’s reign when the country experienced a situation similar to this one, his administration then introduced winter maize. It will be nice to learn from the pros and cons of that initiative to see where improvements could be made if the same were encouraged now.

Otherwise, the situation does not look too good going into this year, unless there will be a sudden change in climate conditions.