April 19th, 2016 - The Maize Front

It has been difficult to be away from Zambia in what is turning out to be a crucial year in the continuing saga of maize: 

• Zambia announced back on the 6th (April) that maize exports, inclusive of bran, the by products of milling off the endocarp when making white (breakfast meal);
• Maize prices in Zambia are allegedly going to be controlled by government, but the routine of cross-border smuggling (through buyers purchasing at retail and reselling in DRC and Malawi) from two years ago and last year is replaying on a much greater scale;
• Queues for maize meal have been increasing, with buyers at supermarkets (e.g., Shoprite, Pick-n-Pay, etc.) limited to one 25kg bag per person;
• Prices have gone through the roof for the commodity, particularly in southwest and western Zambia, with 25kg of mealie meal selling at K200 ($21.39USD);
• Farmers in the same region as above are selling cows ... something of a !! because only better off have cows and they are not usually sold unless they are on death's door. "Prices" are in barter; families are getting 4 or 5 bags of maize (unmilled) for a single cow. This represents a kwacha value of K280 to K350 ($30 ~ $37.4 USD) per cow, as reported on-the-ground from Mwandi, west of Livingstone.

Word from ZNFU:

CME Soya futures price for May 2016 delivery opened trading at US$354.21/MT on 18th April 2016.

Local Soya beans spot prices were still hovering around ZMW5, 900-6,400/MT ($630 - 684USD) last week according to information captured on the ZNFU market price information system.

...

Malawi is forecasting a further reduction in its maize output this year. The country’s production estimates are currently around 2.43 million tons against a national consumption requirement estimated at 3.2 million tons. Zambia has been a major source of the maize grain to Malawi over the last year through both formal and informal trade. Meanwhile the Malawian President on 12th April declared a state of national disaster as the northern part of the country experiences floods and the southern drought.

On the local scene GRZ through Ministry of Agriculture is expected to issue a Statutory Instrument (SI) to facilitate the trading of maize grain and maize products sometime this week. This follows recent announcement by the Ministry of Agriculture that the country had adequate stocks to meet the national demand for maize.

 The CME Corn futures price for March 2016 delivery opened trading at US$147.71/MT on 18th April 2016.

 The offer price on the ZNFU market information system was in the range of ZMW 1,300/MT to ZMW 1,900/MT ($139.03 - 203 USD) in the week ending 18th April 2016.

...

AVERAGE DAY OLD CHICK PRICES
... No changes were registered in the price of day old chicks during the course of the week. However, day old chick outlets/agents have indicated that there has been a significant drop in the sales of day old chicks this year mainly caused by the increased cost of production, particularly increased cost of feed which some of the small scale farmers cannot keep up with.

January 16th, 2016 - Not a viable field

This blog represents the views of the author's alone, and does not represent the views of his employer, Concern Worldwide.

News from the World of Maize:

Over the past few days, I hosted a friend of mine who works in southwestern Zambia and northern Malawi. He clued me in to some of the bits of information:

1. Maize stocks in Malawi are at spectacularly low levels ... he revealed a date of March 4th as the proverbial D-Day. I did a bit of digging online and FEWSNET has the following concurrence Currently food insecure populations in 12 districts spanning parts of the southern and northern regions are receiving assistance. Response programming to these areas and an additional 13 districts have enough funding for implementation through February 2016. Assistance originally planned for the month of March 2016 is uncertain due to a remaining 25 percent funding shortfall
2. It was interesting the deadline of March, which is keyed to the availability of direct budgetary aid, something which the Malawian government relies on to a greater extant that most countries in the region, a by-product of not being blessed [cursed] with mineral or other resources of the extraction variety. Part of what R. said got me trolling through the web; it appears that Malawi's President Peter Mutharika is under pressure to accept donor aid, particularly from DFiD, with some strings attached, namely that Malawi decriminalizes homosexuality. This has caused quite a stir in what I consider a significantly more conservative country than Zambia. According to the BBC, a moratorium was enacted on the laws, but full repeal of the law is a huge issue of realpolitik for Mutharika, who risks incredible backlash on the issue against both himself and threatened recrimination against the LGBT community. 
3. This has been accompanied by a steady rise of maize prices on the market (as is the case in Zambia) that has not been helped by the suspension of sales from ADMARC, Malawi's parastatal [government-run] agriculture marketing board which is by the largest buyer and seller of maize in the country. This has been exacerbated by the theft of maize by local ADMARC officers.

This morning, four hours after we parted ways, he sent this he sent this chilling text as he drove through Southern Province:

"Country is f***ed, not one viable maize field from Maz[abuka] to Choma, brutal!"

January 1st, 2016 - A Bleak Start to the New Year

The views expressed on this blog are the author's alone and do not reflect the views of his employer, Concern Worldwide.

Lusaka remains cursed by sunshine on this dawn the New Year in Zambia. Sitting up last night with friends listening to Zambians shooting off fireworks in the revelry, we looked up a sky chock full of stars and reflected on the oddity of that; typically, this time of year is cloudy, gray, cool, rainy, etc. Instead, we've had bright, blue, hot, dry, etc. To this day, I still cannot puzzle out the workings of the ITCZ, but the best I can figure is that current ENSO (el Nino) is holding the zone in a kinked, stable position ... this means that the frontal boundary (for lack of a better word) moist air that brings rain is not moving south from a roughly in a east-west line centered on Kabwe. Though Zambia historically has a increasing rainfall gradient as you move south-to-north, this year it seems to be less of a smooth linear, and rather a sudden step from too dry to too wet; further, the dry areas are mostly in the West and South.

This has piled on to the crummy rainy season those same areas had in 2014/2015 (which I can now safely refer to as "last year's season"). Most of those areas, particularly in Western Province, were long-ago declared "disaster drought" (GRZ, inclusive of nearly every district survey other than Mongu) or "stressed" (in the terminology of FEWSNET). My friends in the southwestern arc of the Upper Zambezi (e.g., Kazangula, Mwandi, Sesheke) along the Botswana and Namibian border told me over the Holidays that there aren't many words left to describe how bad it is there; ominously, their planting rains never really started, so much of their maize is already dead before the V3 stage. Long and short, people are desperately hungry and have been for quite some time; unfortunately, this year seems to be shaping up to be a bad one in both buLozi and buTonga.

Funny enough, no one seems to notice. There's really been nothing in the papers, including the Post, which has turned its back on the "Real PF" and returned to its virulently anti-ruling party roots; nothing from the donor community; nothing from the government outside of what anecdotal evidence suggests is entirely stochastic; nothing from the Barotse Royal Establishment. It's a wall of silence that is deafening in its sheer immensity, behind which despairing people are perched on a precarious cliff of hunger; it's only so much time before the West and South face the full-blown spectre of starvation. Those same people's (at least strong and healthy enough to do so) efforts are fully in engaged in warding off that hunger with any means at hand, meaning the natural environment is taking the worst beating in years. The so-called "Fish Ban", the eponymous policy that forbids capture fishing of wild fish stocks in virtually all forms between December 1st. and March 1st, is now in its second year of being totally, even brazenly, ignored. Charcoal burning is so rampant that finding Julbernardia or Brachestygia specimens of any size within 50km of Mongu is now an impossibility. Logging has increased exponentially within the five years I have been in Western, particularly of the Guibourtia coleosperma (Zambezi rosewood, copalwood, false mopane) ... baulks measuring a meter square and at least 2.5 meters long are being hauled out of the Kalahari woodlands to the main road in at least four places that I observed last month. In that sense, the lack of capital is driving localized environmental degradation that exacerbates any potential global climate change, and kneecaps future generations ability to utilize those same resources.

And the poorer? The poorest? The single female mothers? The elderly raising a household of orphans? I see them each time I go out in the field; their eyes betray the slow panic that is the constant twinge of hunger that is never dissipated and rarely dulled. Waking up dizzy and out of sorts, wondering where to look for some daily labor to try to feed their family, hoping that they can manage the work on the one to three hours of available energy they have, leaving nothing in the tank for tilling their own land. How do you plan in that state? How do you adopt a new technology? And yet they remain, cursed with the Zambian trait of waiting on government, hoping the truck comes their way, hoping they get a food pack.

I distinctly remember the late President Michael Sata declaring early in his presidency that where there was hunger, there could be no justice. It is my fervent hope that the government will recall that statement and see fit to be just.