Will anyone be held responsible for current ‘artificial’ maize deficit?
By ZBT correspondent
One major deficiency in the way public affairs are conducted in Zambia is that there is an embedded culture of inpunity and lack of accountability.
Meritocracy is only entertained when in opposition, but when in power, national leaders give in to all sorts of vices which lead to stagnation. This is clear in the way the country has ended up with a huge maize deficit.
After many predictions and warnings of an impending drought, the impact is well underway. The drought, it should be mentioned, was predicted in good time, but the general reaction to the available information, was lax at best.
As early as May 2023, the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) issued an advisory on the expected conditions related to El Niño, including lower than expected rainfall for larger swaths of the country.
Significant for Zambia was that the impact centered around the most productive regions of the country, namely the Southern, Eastern, and Central Provinces. The official production deficit stands at 1.2 million metric tons of maize, reducing the total output for the production year to 1.7 million tons, grossly shy of the 2.9 million MT minimum total annual consumption required.
This makes for curious reading because despite adequate warning of an impending drought, we, as a country, still went ahead to export roughly 1 million tons of maize with a conservative estimated value of $350,000,000 (price assumed at $350/ton) USD.
A few months down the line, we are faced with the prospect of importing 650K tons of maize at a cost of $260,000,000. This is a damning indictment for the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Finance, and DMMU for their sheer lack of foresight.
Questions loom large on how we achieved the fantastic feat of exporting so much grain while our needs at the time and at present surpassed the need to export.
Despite the government relying on “hope” that the drought would not be as extensive as it is, the foundations for the current problems being experienced were laid in the 2022 announcement of national maize output. In 2022, the official national output for maize stood at 3.2 million MT – by most standards, an overestimate, with the real figure hovering around 2.7 million.
Carrying on with this number has meant there has been an inflated production figure which the drought has now exposed. The litmus test for the inaccuracy was the odd invocation of the Zambia National Services’ assignment to mill maize meal with the hope of affecting the prevailing price of mealie meal, admirable but amateurish at best because there was no disclosure as to where ZNS would procure its stock to keep the façade of cheap mealie meal (from FRA, of course! One would muse), but FRA has a long tradition of a mismatch between stocks on paper and physical stocks held.
This situation unfortunately makes the Ministry of Agric inept at reasonable planning and makes the DMMU culpable for not standing as an independent branch of government with the mandate to mitigate disasters and has been co-opted in parroting false production figures that have led us to the current situation.
The current administration has staked its credibility on being transparent, but the current handling of the drought presents a myriad of problems that need honest self-introspection – results of which, one hopes, would see the need for reliable information to be communicated; managing information is what has led us here.
From an economic standpoint, this compounds an already complicated economic situation in the country, with the national debt still front and centre and yet to be resolved. Managing the drought entails raising cash to procure stocks to cover the while rolling out the annual FISP program (± $400 million USD) – not an enviable position to be found in.
Let’s ask again, are we as a nation intellectually comfortable and honest by blaming all this on El nino and that the leaders and decision makers at the Ministry of Agriculture and the Food Reserve Agency – FRA should not take full responsibility for their failure to keep strategic food reserves?
For comments, contribution and whistleblowing email: editor@zambianbusinesstimes.com
-Zambian Business Times