LANDS, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development deputy minister Vangelis Haritatos says only 10,85% of the two million hectares of Zimbabwe’s arable land is currently being irrigated, limiting the nation’s food security and grain export potential.
The figure, Haritatos noted, represents a troubling gap between water availability and food production potential in a country frequently battered by erratic rainfall and climate shocks.
The deputy minister spoke during the inaugural three-day European Union (EU)–Zimbabwe Business Forum officially opened in Harare on Tuesday.
“We actually have 19 major dams on our books. The priority is the Gwayi-Shangani and Kunzvi dams. Why I say the dam is no longer the project is because the dam itself is an enabler. It brings you the water, but from there, we are looking at irrigation development, we’re looking at power generation, and we’re looking at tourism that comes from that,” Haritatos said.
“As I mentioned, we have 19 dams on our books. I could tell you a lot about Kudu Dam, specifically because it’s in my constituency (Muzvezve). Kudu Dam, I’ll put it out there, you can irrigate 35 000 hectares of land, and you can generate 20 megawatts of power, so there are a lot of exciting times in terms of the dam construction.”
He said the government was heavily invested in ensuring that it could mitigate against the ongoing threat of climate change.
“Moving on to large-scale irrigation development, we are blessed with 10 700 dams, which are small, medium and large scale,” Haritatos said.
“We can irrigate two million hectares of land in Zimbabwe. Disappointingly, we only irrigate 217 000 hectares of irrigation, so we’re less than 10%, or around about 10%, of our national capacity.”
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He noted that this is why the government every now and then could declare food security.
“But, as soon as we have a drought, then we have to declare a disaster simply because we’re not where we should be,” Haritatos said.
“Where we should really be under our irrigation, our accelerated irrigation development rehabilitation plan is that we need to have 497 000 hectares of irrigation, 350 000 hectares of that must be put for cereal crops.
“Those that know simple mathematics, 350 000 times about 5,5 metric tonnes per hectare gives us two million metric tonnes of grain in summer and two million metric tonnes of grain in winter.”
He said the country only consumed 1,8 million metric tonnes of grain annually, leaving a potentially high surplus for exports.
“Now, we also have other initiatives like the Presidential Input Programme and other rain-fed schemes. Once you contribute to that, Zimbabwe easily has the capacity to grow six million to eight million metric tonnes,” Haritatos said.
“Again, the consumption is only 1,8 million metric tonnes, so six million metric tonnes capacity can be exported to the region and internationally quite easily if we can step up our efforts in the irrigation developments field.”
The deputy minister was making a case to EU businesses on the abundant opportunities that lie in Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector, which they can invest in.
A 2019 World Bank report titled Zimbabwe: Agriculture Sector Disaster Risk Assessment found that the nation’s agricultural sector loses US$126 million per annum due to production risks largely associated with drought and other weather-related events.
This means the country is in serious need of investments to scale up production.
“We have a serious deficit in mechanisation. We should have, currently, 40 000 tractors, and we don’t. We only have 15 000 tractors, so we have a deficit of 25 000 tractors,” Haritatos said.
“We also should have at this stage 600 combine harvesters, but we don’t. We have 150 functional combine harvesters in the country, so we have a deficit of about 450.”
The forum is hosting over 60 companies from 12 EU member States, namely France, Germany, Austria, Finland, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and the Czech Republic.
