Has Mnangagwa discovered something new or he is flying blind?

By Phillani Zamchiya

Zimbabwe’s Vice-President, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, announced that the Government of Zimbabwe will embark on an ambitious command agriculture scheme for the 2016-2017 cropping season.

The plan is to produce two million tonnes of maize on 400 000 hectares of land for the 2016-2017 season to be implemented in all the 10 provinces of Zimbabwe. The government will provide inputs, tillage, machinery and chemicals on a cost recovery basis.

This will target farmers who can produce five tonnes per hectare. The overarching idea is to improve national food security as Zimbabwe needs 1.8 million tonnes of grain a year to be self-sufficient. This comes following a meager production of 742 000 tonnes of maize produced in the 2014-2015 cropping season.

What a great idea this could be Mr Vice President. But why did no one think of this before? Actually many did. Command agriculture is older than the state Mnangagwa is governing. In fact, almost all command agricultural schemes have failed around the world and here in Zimbabwe.

This proposed scheme of agrarian simplification is ahistorical at large. Command agriculture schemes have been tried through collectivization in Soviet Russia and Ujamaa villages in Tanzania among other examples, but they have failed.

How a government can propose a production scheme of strong historical echoes of high authoritarian modernism of the 18th century in the 21st century boggles the mind. Similar commandist goals envisioned by Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Stalin et cetera failed to result in increased grain.

For collectivization, the target was to produce a third of the grain required for the country, but ended up producing only 2.2%. The projects never became the technically efficient schemes as envisaged by the designers. The faith in high authoritarian modernism as theoretically conceptualized by James Scott is evident in Mnangagwa’s scheme in spite of evidence of failure.

Just 10 years ago, in typical authoritarian high modernist passion for ‘’gigantomania’’, to borrow Sheila Fitzpatrick’s word, the Zimbabwe government introduced a Z$15 trillion command agriculture. The idea was to put 1.5 million hectares of land under maize and produce 2.25 million tonnes to ensure food security.

Like elsewhere in the world this again failed dismally. In fact, this undermined production in some places such as Matebeleland and worsened food insecurity.

I will not delve into theoretical justifications as to why high modernist authoritarian schemes tend to fail, but will pick on some practical reasons as to why Mnangagwa’s scheme is likely to fail in Zimbabwe.

First, the dominance of patronage politics within the state does not augur well for such schemes. Distributions of state resources partly take the form of preferential access by those who are politically connected to the ruling ZANU PF.

Such resources are rarely invested within the agrarian sector. Rather, empirical data reveals widespread corrupt activities in gaining access to state farm inputs and other resources. This has been the trend from a number of agricultural schemes which played a key role in expanding patronage politics rather than improving production.

Examples include the RBZ’s Productive Sector Facility (PSF) for agriculture in 2004, side stepping the Ministry of Agriculture in post-settlement support; the Agriculture Sector Productivity Enhancement Facility (ASPEF) introduced in 2005 to help finance food production and rebuild the national herd and the Farm Mechanisation Programmes meant to distribute farm equipment to both resettled and communal farmers.

The RBZ used US$200 million to finance the farm mechanization programmes and eventually faced law suits from private companies that supplied the equipment in 2012 after failing to pay.

According to the Ministry of Agricultural Engineering, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development report, the major beneficiaries were cabinet Ministers, ZANU PF MPs and civil servants who received tractors and other farm equipment.

In dwelling on an intervention that focuses on the production outcome only, patronage-based acquisition of resources with all its implications on sustainability of this kind of production is missed out. Not to mention the consequences in the political sphere.

The grandiose scheme is supposed to be implemented in all the ten provinces of Zimbabwe. Yet it is silent on the production variations across agro-ecological zones and field realities on productivity. The scheme is thought out as if every farmer in each region will simply produce the quantity specified by the Vice President in the comfort of his office.

They will struggle to get farmers that will consistently produce 5 tonnes per hectare in some regions. The field realities are that there are regional variations and the national average production of maize is 0.8 tonnes per hectare.

In my study of Chipinge district, the average maize yield per hectare was 0.9, 1.2 and 2.0 tonnes respectively for the struggling, average and well-to-do resettled farmers. In Scoones et al‘s seminal book no resettled farmer in Mwenezi harvested more than a tonne of maize in 2004-05, 2006-07, 2007-08 and 2008-09 agricultural seasons.

Matondi observed that in Mangwe district with similar agro-ecological zones, maize production was also in ruins. The highest recorded maize yield per hectare since 2003 was 0.6 tonnes and that was once in the 2004-2005 season. In better areas like Mazowe the average yield per hectare was 2.45 tonnes per hectare. For Shamva district maize production averages 1 tonne per hectare.

In the second installment, I will look at the consequences of economy-wide failures in fundraising US$ 500 million for such a gigontomania scheme given that most of the funds must be sourced from the private sector, the (in) efficiency of a starved bureaucracy and the vagaries of climate change. The third and last will suggest what can be done to ensure food security in Zimbabwe.