Food shortages loom as alternative crops fail to fill the gap

Hunger is forcing people to compete with elephants for a wild fruit favoured by both. Masau (Ziziphus mauritiana), a popular, sour-tasting, green fruit, fetches US$25 per 50kg bag in Zambia's capital, Lusaka, but collecting the fruit requires that people go into the preferred haunts of elephants, often with tragic results. Some of the 72,000 inhabitants of the southern Zambian village of Siavonga, on the Zimbabwean border, collect wild fruits in large quantities both as a form of food and a source of cash for basic foodstuffs. Richard Hambobe scours the bush daily for fruits, picking his way through the undergrowth as quietly as possible, his senses always tuned for any telltale signs of elephant activity. "We are constantly fearing attacks from elephants when we go to fetch Masau in the bush. We have to be very attentive to any form of noise, just in case an elephant is nearby, as many people have been killed by angry stray elephants from the game reserve area while working in the fields or picking wild fruits," he said. Cash from the sale of wild fruits provides for such things as soap, sugar, cooking oil and salt. Subsistence farming is the main source of income, but a combination of erratic rains, poor soils and elephants trampling maize fields keeps people trapped in poverty and hunger. Zambia posted a crop surplus of 300,000 tonnes over its national requirement of 1.2 million tonnes this year, but the word 'nzala' (hunger in Tonga) still comes up often in conversations between Hambobe and many of his fellow villagers, who will need food aid this year. Most of Siavonga's people were displaced from the fertile valleys where they lived until 1959, to make way for the construction of Kariba Dam, the hydroelectric power station shared with neighbouring Zimbabwe. Attempts by the Zambian government and the World Bank to move people from Siavonga's arid and heavily eroded terrain have routinely failed. "We have buried our ancestors here and it would bring a bad omen upon us if we were to leave them alone. Government should just provide us with irrigation equipment, like they have been doing with farm inputs, instead of forcing us to relocate to other places," said Petros Chuulu, 62, a subsistence farmer. The lack of opportunities in the area has prompted many young adults to migrate to urban areas, leaving behind the elderly and the very young. Anderson Mutinta, the district co-ordinator for Siavonga in Zambia's ministry of agriculture, said the rainfall pattern in the region was always below normal, with lengthy dry spells causing poor harvests and few proceeds from cash crops. "Our average rainfall is about 650mm but we always get far below that and, as a result, our farmers are only able to harvest less than one tonne of maize per hectare, even if the potential of most seed varieties they are using is quite high," Mutinta said. The harsh cultivation conditions have led to the agriculture ministry promoting the use of more drought-resistant crops, such as sorghum and millet, as alternatives to white maize, the staple food. But Siavonga seldom produces more than 50 percent of its total maize requirement, and small-scale farmers have not embraced sorghum and millet. Farmer Georgina Njekwa, whose husband died in 2002, leaving her with four school-aged children, said sorghum and millet had no economic value beyond being used as alternative sources of mealie-meal (maizemeal). "No one is interested in buying sorghum or millet. We only have to grow them for food ... but what do I do if I need to raise money to pay for my children in school, or buy medicine, when there is no market for the two crops?" she said. "There is also the problem of poor storage, since we can't afford the expensive silo sacks. We use traditional granaries which are very vulnerable to pests if the crop overstays," Njekwa said. In the 2005/06 growing season, which has just ended, Siavonga produced just over seven tonnes of cereal: 9 tonnes below the town's estimated annual consumption of 16 tonnes. Of the seven tonnes, sorghum accounted for two tonnes, while the total millet output was less than one tonne. "We need food supplementation of about eight tonnes to meet our annual cereal requirement," Mutinta said. "The current food stocks of some farmers should be running out completely by early October."