The Potato Industry in Zimbabwe Is Struggling
Potato production in Zimbabwe is plunging, with farmers citing lack of financial support from government, drought and economic challenges, reports All Africa.
Despite the government declaring potatoes a strategic food security crop back in 2012, not much has been invested into production of the crop.
Peter Steyl chairman of the Zimbabwe Seed Potatoes Companies Associations (ZSPCA), who was cited by the report, also noted that there has been a decline in potato production.
“This is due to the economic environment where there is very little disposable income and consumers are going for cheaper options,” Steyl explained.
Once the government declared the potato a strategic food security crop in 2012, production surged, for a while, partly because seed companies were able to import high yielding seed from South Africa and Europe, Steyl said.
This enabled the farmers to sell his crop at low prices and still make a very good return and enabled those that previously could not afford potatoes to buy them, and thus, creating a much bigger market.
The Government, however, later banned seed imports, encouraging farmers to purchase and plant locally produced seed.
“Most of these local varieties were very old and not very high yielding, coupled with this seed production was inadequate. This caused a shortage of potatoes in the market ensuring the prices were good. This resulted in potatoes being unaffordable to a large segment of the population,” Steyl added.
Even so, the Agricultural Technical and Extension Services (Agritext) reports indicate that national average yields grew about 15mt per ha in 2010 to about 24.7mt by 2017.
Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers’ Union vice president Maiwepi Jiti said there is a need to invest in knowledge in Zimbabwe. Potatoes like any crop need water, hence irrigation investment cause the crop cannot be rain-fed. But while a farmer cannot grow potatoes without irrigation, most irrigation facilities are dilapidated and or vandalized in the country.
Jiti also noted that potato production is quite expensive considering the amount of fertilizer, cost of seed and chemicals required in order to maximize on yield. For example, you need 20 to 50kg bags of compound fertilizer to grow one hectare of potatoes.
Coming in support of the industry, the Land, Agriculture, Water, Climate and Rural Resettlement deputy minister Vangelis Haritatos said a number of measures were implemented by the government in the past 10 years to boost potato production.
These include a ban on table potato imports since 2010 to protect the local potato farmers from unfair competition with potatoes from South Africa which were flooding the local market, registration of new seed houses and new potato varieties, among other interventions.
In addition, he said, the government has so far registered about 23 high yielding potato varieties over the past seven years, giving farmers a wide choice of planting materials.
Haritatos said as a direct impact of government policies and the response by farmers and the private sector, national potato production trends had been increasing exponentially from the year 2010 when the country produced a total of 52,000mt up to 475,000 mt produced in 2017.
Haritatos, however, admitted that from 2017 to date, potato production had decreased due to a number of factors affecting all other value chains in the economy such as power outages, shortage of foreign currency and climate change.
