The promotion of maize fertiliser packages: A cause of household food insecurity and peasant impoverishment in high rainfall areas of Zimbabwe

Abstract

Child malnutrition is a continuing problem in Zimbabwe's communal areas. These include some high rainfall areas, which make a contribution to the country's maize surplus during non‐drought years. A survey of farmers and extension workers in four high rainfall communal areas was carried out to investigate the effects of following recommended practices for maize production on household economy and food security.

Thirty‐two per cent of communal farmers had applied all the officially recommended fertiliser to their 1990/91 maize crop, often by obtaining these inputs on credit in lieu of grain sales receipts from the subsequent harvest. Yet. yields were so low that 48 per cent of these farmers would have been unable to retain sufficient grain to satisfy their families’ minimum requirements, if they had reimbursed the full cost of the input credit.

The majority (64 per cent) of farmers had deviatedfrom the recommended practice by adopting ‘low external input strategies’. A key feature of most of these strategies was the substitution of manure for part or all of the recommended fertiliser. In three of the four communal areas studied, this had improved the chances not only of recovering input costs, but also of achieving maize self‐sufficiency.

These results suggest that policy‐makers should shift emphasis from a dependence on costly external inputs to the integration of low levels of fertiliser with a range of more natural methods of soil improvement, in an effort to improve household food security in the communal areas.

Notes

Respectively from the International Institute of Parasitology. 395a, Hatfield Road, St Albans, AL4 OXU. UK, and the Zimbabwe Institute of Permaculture, PO Box 8515, Harare. Zimbabwe.

Financial support for the fleldwork and data analysis for this survey was kindly provided by the Ford Foundation. We are grateful to Mrs Chikweshera, V Marere. R Munetsi and E Tunha for carrying out the fleldwork. and to John Wilson and his colleagues at the Zimbabwe Institute of Permaculture for administrative assistance. We also wish to thank Richard Plowright. Kate Showers, Simon Maxwell and Ian Scoones for their helpful comments during the preparation of this manuscript.