My buddy Ger Vaughn from back home in Upper Michigan sent me some Waylon Jennings songs which I'm currently enjoying. The guy was a bard in a beard and a vest; I'm genuinely sad that I never will get to meet him. A bard who smoke and drank and womanized ... boozing, hollering, and whoring. I guess you need some pain in your life to be a poet; a singer; a writer. Or you need to make pain.
Or I suppose you could write from joy. Or insanity? I'm thinking of John of Patmos.
Me, I write out of a sea of boredom. It's not the kind of boredom that results from not being busy enough, that's for sure. We've had a couple of fairly high-level national staff take new jobs, and hiring a replacement is a arduous process; in no small part due to the fact that most qualified Zambians don't want to move to Mongu or Senanga. That says a lot about out Western; kind of a perverse pride for me ... I'll work somewhere Zambians won't.
Work. Work. Work work work. It is endless sometimes; there is really no glamour in the work. I sit in front of a small box with a window on it; in this window are documents that are endlessly revised, magically sent off to Dublin, New York, Kaoma, Lusaka and sent back for revision. Mostly these documents make my head ache; they [the headaches] are augmented by smaller, temporal documents that come through a brutal taskmaster with only one name: Outlook. This demon controls all the magic communication; you have to be careful, as he remembers all you say.
The great Demon Outlook is seconded by a careless imp named Skype. Skype is somewhat less the scrutinizing beast that is Outlook; Skype allows much more levity, encouraging you to communicate with simple pictures of a smiley face, a pukey face, a martini glass, etc. You can also talk to others, though the Imp shows his recidivist side periodically, cutting you off unexpectedly, or amplifying whatever small noise issues from the back of your throat that get interpreted as skeptical guffaws or grumbled curses.
Anyway, my work has little to do with the farmers. I mostly direct my own or partner staff who then go work at the next level down, and those people work with the farmers. When I do visit the farmers, it is usually me fielding their complaints, particularly about us not supplying with enough fertilizer or seeds, or the wrong seeds, or not giving out pesticides (things that kill weeds = herbicides or things that kill bugs = insecticides). You never leave the field feeling really good about what you do or who you work with; mostly, you struggle with a) your inner Republican straining to break free and go all Horace Alger on the beneficiaries, b) your self-doubts about what you're doing, and c) your silent relief that you don't live in the village. Kwa hai is not a forgiving place, especially when it rains; everyone looks and sounds like they just pulled a week in Andersonville; snuffling and shuffling is the rule of the day. You can understand why young men scramble for the nearest town, somewhere where you can possibly Horace-Alger-hustle your way up the social ladder and not have to sleep rough in the damp and cold.
Oh well; gotta take the good with the bad. It's rained quite a bit lately; the corn is growing; there is no crime; food's not spectacular, but there's enough of it. And maybe we'll have Ku'omboka this year.
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.