Post Christmas Maize Woes

There is a frightening diversity of insects flying and crawling all over the blockhouse tonight ... doubtless, the end to the three or four days of rain has induced them to come out, and as they are wont to do, make a straight line towards any light source. So far, no is too bothersome; after spending a few years in the bush with a candle for dinner company, you get inured to things crawling all over you.

There were exceptions to that rule, notably the specimens of Solifugae (wind spiders) that would emerge from the forest adjacent to my house in October and move with a speed indicative of their name towards the candle that provided my gestation's luminescence. My reaction was an uncontrollable heaving of my plate in one direction and leaping off the porch in the other.

It's far easier (in many, many ways both subtle and not) these days, particularly my ability to light a mosquito coil and prevent any organized attack by the assemblage of the Anthropoda kingdom. Instead, they fly and crawl in happy chaos, randomly hitting me in the face or drinking the sweat off my neck.

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Three things have been blaring out over the airwaves and newspapers (real and virtual) with regard to maize recently, which I will present in summary fashion:

1. Army worms came out of nowhere with the first rains and hammered the emerging maize crop in November and the first half of December. Though this didn't touch Western (a maize-growing, but not maize-producing region), it nailed the maize belt regions (Central, Southern, and Eastern) quite bad. It was bad enough for the government to expedite the release of 2,000 metric tonnes of seed maize in a relatively short period. Hope it was a 400 series, because Christmas planting is not a sure thing ... depending on our rain, this might be a short year, as the BBC doubtless hopes. 
2. Mealie meal (maize flour), the basis of Zambia's staple food [nshima] has climbed steadily in price throughout the country due to shortages in the Copperbelt. The shortages are ascribed to people purchasing job lots of the commodity at wholesale (or even retail) prices, throwing all the bags they can manage on a motorcycle, mini-bus, ox-cart, etc., and crossing the border into DRC where the price is substantially higher. Zambia's high urbanization levels makes the price of nshima (which is literally food in this country) a serious political issue. Hence, more maize is being sold by FRA towards the national milling companies, albeit at a loss vs. what they [haven't] paid the farmers. Generally, the high prices are poorly understood by Zambians high or low, who envision the milling companies as gouging them for the sustenance despite "bumper harvests". To me, an American raised with the usual inculcation of cutthroat capitalism, it's not really a surprise whatsoever. The milling companies produce something everyone [thinks they] need. They don't get elected, and they have a golden goose in front of them. Plus, they have bigger silos ... they can buy and buy and control the output of maize meal. 
3. The poor rain patterns across the maize belt. It didn't really get going until deep into November. 

How it will pan out is anyone's guess ... I doubt nationalization is on the table yet, but a poor harvest and a hollering hungry public will doubtless move the government's hand.

Kwacha Re-basement (aka. the Death of the Pin)

The Post had as is the pattern of the British papers on which it's modeled, a blaring headline reading:

ATMS RUN OUT OF CASH IN LUSAKA

It's worthwhile to note that as development goes, this story would have been non-existent five years ago (they were always out of cash) or eight (when there were literally a handful of ATMs in the country). 

The run on the machines is somewhat related to the time of year ... it is Christmas, and Zambians joining Planet Capitalism are following the well-trod path of purchasing gifts, particularly for their own children to enjoy and the parents of others to envy.

However, as an unidentified bank official pointed out, "It's not just the usual heightened festive season spending, I think there is also the fears of the kwacha rebasing."

Zambian money currently looks something like this:

 

Denominations range from K50, K100, K500, K1000, K5000 (shown above with front and reverse), K10000, K20000, and K50000. The 'th' sound is different in Bantu languages, so all the currencies with three zeroes are colloquially suffixed as 'pin'. Therefore, a K20000 note is "20 pin" and so on. The current exchange rate is K5,300 to $1.00 USD; essentially, the currency hasn't changed since in the introduction of the K50000 note nine or ten years ago.

Now, for reasons I'm not sure of expressing given my status as a guest in this country (but expressed within this document from the Bank of Zambia), they are killing the pins. Three zeroes will be hacked off each note, ergo K5000 becomes (kwacha rebased) KR5.





The smaller denominations (equal to or less than K1000) will become coins named identical to their predecessors, the "ingwe". Given the prevalence of transactions at value K2,000 and at K100,000, new notes (KR2 and KR100) will also be released.







Internationally, the currency code for the old kwacha is ZMK; on Tuesday

It's somewhat worrying how the transition is simply not getting through to people; I'm sure in the rural areas, people are digging deep holes and stuffing calabashes full of money down them (which will doubtless attract termites by the thousand score). Supposedly, on 1st January, 2013 (next Tuesday), all shops / marketeers will need to post prices in both currencies, and if possible, start paying out the new currency when at all possible. The opportunities for chicanery will be endless ... fake exchange commissions, inflated prices for small items, etc. It will certainly do wonders for already booming calculator sales.

I wonder how it will pan out when paying out bribes to the cops ... will they demand K or KR?

My reaction? Wait. Watch. Pulled out money well in advance. Sleep. Rewrite all my documents with the new values. Y2K all over again.

Christmas Crackers

The two Peace Corps Response Volunteers that stay in Mongu and are both good friends came by for a day of hanging out, enjoying some mild libation, eating a 'light' brunch of homemade pancakes and eggs, followed almost six hours later by one of my more of my memorable culinary performances:

1. Mongu [Super] Rice (of course)
2. Stir-fried tomatoes, garlic, green peppers, mushrooms, sesame seeds, millet, and lightly crushed groundnuts
3. Cowpeas, bambara nuts, and harricot beans 
4. Local squash with sauteed onions / garlic ... baked grilled
5. Shin steak
6. Plaaswoers (Afrikaans for "farmer sausage", I guess)
7. Beer can chicken

It was epic, tasty, and yet simple enough not to overwhelm the our shared bond of loneliness, of separation from kith and kin. 

The two Christmas traditions we followed:

1. Christmas Crackers - Totally British, but now I know where originated all the paper crowns depicted in English Christmas films. 
2. Prayer. As one of the PCRV's said ... it'd be a sin not to pray in front of all this food. 

To all my friends ... it's been a bumpy year, but you take the good with the bad, and the former usually outweighs the latter. 

I'm still doing what I do best, though not very well;

I still am learning more from the farmers than they teach me; 

Never take what little / excess you have for granted;

I miss you all so much;

And the best is yet to come;

Take care, Happy Holidays, and Godspeed in 2013

Danny & Carl

Rain is a bird

I have been tramping around Mongu district in our Conservation Agriculture (CA) project areas for the past three days, and the consistent thing I can say is that nothing was consistent. Field sizes, plot locations, plant population, row spacing, farmer knowledge, planting dates, etc., etc., vary all over the map; the only commonality was that almost no one knew what the names of the seeds were that they planted.

Oh, and one slight detail ... it hasn't rained much since November 15th, the unofficial start of our planting season.

When I was passing for a soil science student while doing my master's degree in agroecology, we learned about Liebig's Law of the Minimum ... the idea that a plant's growth is limited by the most limited nutrient. For example, if you have plenty of phosphorus (Ph) and nitrogen (N), but lack potassium (K), a given plant will only grow / yield according to the limiting K, effectively canceling the surplus Ph and N.

Pictorially, it is represented as a old-style barrel with staves of different lengths:


Wikipedia (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Minimum-Tonne.svg/220px-Minimum-Tonne.svg.png)

The amount of water (you're eventual yield) that you can hold in Liebig's barrel is limited by the shortest stave. Pretty simple, and unfortunately, one of those immutable laws like gravity, death, Murphy's, etc.

We were evaluating fields in Namushakende, and I couldn't get that damn barrel out of my head. We encourage farmers to plant with the first rains after November 15th (which fell variably across the Namushakende area on either the 25th or 28th). They did so, and then it hasn't really rained much since. A double kicker with the lovely sunny days is that the soil surface in the fields in the sandy uplands gets hot enough to fry eggs ... whatever germinates sits in a 10 cm zone of absolute broiling heat. So the maize that has come up is looking like so many rows of onions.

Water is the most limiting of limiting factors.

__What do we do? I would shrug and point up at the sky, though I sincerely doubt lack of churches is driving this particular dry spell.

Our extension worker in Namushakende is a older gentlemen with elven features and a subtle sense of humor, and he told me as we were wrapping up our monitoring that there was a saying in siLozi to the effect that "rain is a bird". I asked what he meant; moving his hands rapidly side-to-side, he explained that the rain shifts around a lot like a bird.

Is it common to beseech the Almighty in a blog? I'm not sure, but God, please send rain.

Maize Subsidies

More to write later; have been in the field visiting farmers, so getting up early and arriving late.

Another blurb from yesterday's Post (Dec. 12, 2012):

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Maize subsidies

By The Post Wed 12 Dec. 2012, 10:10 CAT   [430 Reads, 0 Comment(s)]

Food security is central to the economic, political and social future of our country.

Meeting the basic needs to families must take top priority in any government planning, with an agricultural policy that really respects the earth, the farmer and the consumer. Hunger in our society is a sign of gross injustice and a block to development.

We need to provide food at prices which both give a just return to farmers and are reasonable to consumers. We evaluate agricultural policies with particular concern for the sacredness of the land, and justice, especially towards the poor.

Independence is meaningless if we cannot feed ourselves as a country. And since independence, successive governments have been battling with the issue of food security. Many initiatives have been undertaken by government to deal with this challenge. The total failure of these endeavours to achieve the basic and essential objective of supplying all our people with enough food to develop their potentialities for enjoying a full life is today more evident than ever. We still have today many people who each day cannot meet the basic food needs necessary for a decent human life. And it is a strict duty of justice not to allow fundamental food needs to remain unsatisfied. Economic justice requires that each individual has adequate food to survive to develop and thrive. And economic growth depends in the very first place on social progress.

By now, it is perfectly obvious that the agricultural policies we have been pursuing have failed to eradicate hunger and give our people the necessary food security. We cannot say these policies haven't been well-meant. They actually have been more well-meant though unsuccessful. The painful truth is that, despite the efforts to eradicate food insecurity, this challenge persists and tends to grow. Why?

What this means is that we need to go back to the drawing board, re-examine critically everything we have done so far in this domain. We need to come up with new initiatives to enable us to meet our people's needs for basic foodstuffs as much as possible.

Our government has been spending too much money every year subsidising the production of maize and mealie-meal. But nothing seems to be changing, and this is increasingly becoming a permanent feature. The government is spending over US$300 million every year to subsidise maize production and mealie-meal consumption. The government is buying a 50-kilogramme bag of maize at K65,000 and selling it to the millers at K60,000.

And part of this maize and mealie-meal is consumed in the neighbouring countries. Even some of the subsidised fertiliser ends up in our neighbouring countries. What it means is we are subsidising maize production and consumption not only in Zambia but also in our neighbouring countries. This is not sustainable, no matter how much we love our neighbours and would like to help them.

An immediate solution to this problem should be found. Probably there may be need to consider modifying our subsidy to maize production and consumption. If this cannot be done in a more efficient and effective manner, a total removal of the subsidy to maize production and consumption may be inevitable. In saying this, we are not in any way advocating total removal of subsidies to agriculture. We are simply recognising the need for more efficient and effective subsidies. The current subsidy to maize production and consumption has proved not to be efficient and effective.

And this also calls for serious consideration of other food crops like rice. We cannot continue to depend on maize for our staple food; it's too expensive. It will be much cheaper for us as a nation to start seriously considering increasing the consumption of rice, which is much cheaper to produce. Rice doesn't need fertilisers and it is much more environmentally friendly to produce.

We shouldn't cheat ourselves that we have always been consumers of maize meal. The consumption of maize meal is something that was promoted by the mining corporations and the commercial farmers they had promoted. Our people were consumers of millet, sorghum and cassava. The consumption of maize meal was very limited. The same way we were made to become dependent on maize meal can be done to rice. We should learn to start to live within our means. In our traditional society, maize was produced cheaply because there was no use of fertilisers and other complicated farming methods.

At the current cost of producing maize, it can be said to be beyond us as a staple food and we have to start looking elsewhere. We are not saying the production of maize should be stopped. No. What we are saying is that maize should be produced, sold and consumed at its real cost. Those who can afford to eat maize nshima two or three times a day, let them do so, while those who cannot afford it are provided with affordable alternatives like rice.

Of course, the issue of maize meal has been highly politicised. But it can also be depoliticised in the same way. And this government is in a far much better position to change things because it is a highly popular one. If Michael Sata went around the country explaining why we need to increase the consumption of rice and reduce on maize, people will understand him better and follow. There is need for political mobilisation on this issue. Making food cheaper both in terms of production and consumption should be the aim of this government.

It will be very difficult under the current policy and approach to have sustainable agricultural production and food security. We are spending too much money for very little food security. If part of the money we are spending on maize subsidies was diverted to other crops, we would achieve a much higher level of food security than we currently have. If something has failed, there is no need to hang on to it, come what may.

Moreover, the majority of the world population lives on rice. We have all the conditions in almost every province of our country needed for the production of rice and other food crops. It is not wise for us to cling so much to maize. A political decision needs to be made for us to adopt more rational, more sensible agricultural and food security policies.