Food, FRA, and floor prices

I've totally run out of ideas for snappy titles. Come to think of it, lately I've totally run out of ideas. 

Still, wanted to share a great quote from this week's Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like (definitely a more regular and better read than this blog). 

[As a quick rule of thumb for those considering the leap to 'the field': if you’re in an area where different cultures have been interacting, fighting, and generally sloshing around for centuries, chances are the food is relatively decent. Which generally means the coasts. The further inland you go, the greater the chance that the local culture has been spent centuries perfecting various ways to eat sorghum. (Thus the tendency to facipulate those life-saving workshops in places like Bali, Istanbul, or Rome: amazing coffee breaks and team dinners.)]

Wow did they nail this on the head ... Zambia is so thoroughly nshima-fied that I'm starting to discern between different places and how they serve nshima (buhobe, sima, nsima, ubwali, ugali, nsadza, pap, etc.). I've noticed much of the restaurant nshima in Western lately has taken on a certain odor and texture indicative of the owners cutting the maize meal with cassava in order to keep the prices steady; maize meal, especially the refined version, so-called "breakfast meal", is spectacularly highly priced right now. Reasons are mainly around the FRA (the default supplier of maize grain to the large-scale national millers (AMC "Mother's Pride", Mealile, APG, ChoBro, etc.): 

1. They are still offloading stocks from last year (the PF wants to take no risks with over-exporting, as that was political dynamite last year);
2. The Government (known here as "Government") has yet to set the "floor price" for maize. Speaking with a friend of mine via Facebook (Dr. William Burke), he clarified that is something of a misnomer; a true floor price is a mandated minimum price (per weight or volume) below which sellers cannot legally purchase. The FRA floor price is simply a pan-territorial price, e.g., every large, medium and satellite (e.g., typically small and remote) depot in the country will pay farmers the same price, regardless of whether that farmer is selling in Shan'gombo (800 km and 16 hours from Lusaka) or Chibombo (the first district immediately north of Lusaka). 

The second point is a touchy one for Government; as I've said sporadically over the years, maize (and its main derivative, maize meal) is staggeringly important in Zambian political necessity. The strange phenomenon that is Zambia's high urban population (relative to the population) means that much of the population that is politically very active consumes lots of nshima, and ergo wants cheap mealie meal. On the flip side, the rural population (the producers ... note, commercial producers are not allowed to sell maize to FRA), wants a high price for the commodities they produce. With the current ruling party (the Patriotic Front or PF) being a proponent of "pro-poor" policies, that puts them in a tough spot ... the urban poor want cheap food, the rural poor want higher prices, so they have to hit something of a sweet spot to satisfy both. 

Compounding the headache for this year is the bumper harvest recorded this past season. There is a lot of maize out there; not necessarily by Iowa standards, but for Zambia 3.3 million tonnes is pretty good despite the still shockingly low productivity levels. Everyone who grew the maize (rural) wants to sell it all at [much] more than the K65 which has been the market price since 2009. The urbanites see the bumper harvest as a sign that mealie meal will get back to K30 or K40 / 25kg bag as it was a few years ago. 

Small wonder that a maize cob features so prominently on Zambia's Coat of Arms, bracketed by the motto "One Zambia, One Nation" ... wonder if it stands to reason that it might by the linchpin between urban-and-rural.