This season's El Nino drought has stressed the need for Zimbabwe to move as fast as possible to develop irrigation capacity for both fully irrigated crops and for supplementary irrigation of summer crops.
This requires dams and boreholes, but also the major additional infrastructure of more piping, more pumps, more spraying capacity, and indirectly more power stations and electricity generation.
We can use conservation agricultural techniques, and these are important even with expanding irrigation to ensure that the water we can store in dams and underground irrigates as many hectares as possible with minimum waste.
We need to remember that there is a limit to how much run-off we have each rainy season, and this will be less in the more frequent drought years, and while we need to store almost all of that water, we will never have enough water to flood the country. Every drop will have to count and grow something.
A lot of the expansion has been planned for years. What is needed to convert the dusty plans into green fields is money, a lot of money. The Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development is talking about mobilising public, private, investor and foreign funds, in other words all possible sources, to get the necessary work done as quickly as possible.
An emergency irrigation development programme is now working, to take Zimbabwe from a little over 200 000ha of irrigated land to around 350 000ha by next year, a jump of more than 70 percent. Some of this is easy: repairing and rehabilitating non-functioning irrigation, making full use of the new dams that have been commissioned under the Second Republic and drawing more water from major rivers, which are generally on our borders.
Even this will need a lot of money. So far US$41 million in public funding has been budgeted and the Ministry is expecting topping up from other sources such as the United Nations system, NGOs and the private sector.
The emergency programme is doable, and is a practical and viable programme, so long as everyone who needs to be involved comes on board.
We are already moving rapidly towards having more intensive summer and winter irrigation. Farmers with irrigation equipment and water sources do not irrigate their summer crops the way they irrigate winter wheat, which basically needs 100 percent irrigation water. Instead they use irrigation to help get crops started a bit earlier, and then switch on the sprayers when there are the long dry spells during the season that are becoming more common.
In the end they might end up having to use irrigation to provide half the water their summer crops need, but that is a significant advance on the total irrigation they must supply for winter cropping. This does affect the costs. Irrigation, even without the capital costs, is not cheap. Electricity and water are not free and cannot be free, and even non-Zesa electricity has major costs, such as diesel generators or the monthly payments for large solar systems with batteries.
That has a final effect on the final producer price a respectable and competent farmer needs to remain viable, and that in turn has a bearing on the food prices consumers must pay. A cry for subsidies does occasionally arise, but this is a very bad way of using scarce public funds since both the rich and poor are subsidised.
What is far better is to have final prices reflect the actual costs with fair mark-ups and then make sure the vulnerable and very poor have allowances that they can use to buy food. This means that, indirectly, we are still subsidising, but are only subsidising the poor, not the middle-income groups and the rich.
As a basic example, if we have $15 million for helping Zimbabweans buy food we can either grant a subsidy that ensures every Zimbabwean gets $1 worth of help, or we can give $3 to the bottom third to buy their food themselves.
In any case the history of subsidising food in Zimbabwe is not a happy one. There were cases in the past when pig farmers would buy subsidised mealie meal to feed their pigs while selling off all their maize, and the last time there was subsidised roller meal it disappeared off the shelves of shops as hired touts grabbed the lot, and reappeared at far higher prices in informal markets. Only the criminals gained.
These sort of discussions are going to be required as irrigation potential is turned into irrigation water. Pricing will need to take into account irrigation costs, although we would stress that the pricing needs to look at the better and more efficient farmers.
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Good farmers should be kept in business growing food, and producer prices need to reflect that need. But the bad farmers should not be given the same leeway, and if they leave the land then more good farmers can be settled.
Dams need not just be the very large dams, what are termed high-impact dams because of the number of farmers they benefit. There are already thousands of small dams, and a swathe of modest more formal dams. These are far less expensive and can be fitted into most communities. An impounded lake with a surface area of 5ha to 25ha does not displace large numbers and may in fact displace no one.
A small dam might only serve a handful of farmers, but we simply make sure all suitable sites have such a dam. They still need a proper design but the earth wall is not expensive. While a spillway of rock and concrete is needed, careful design can minimise the costs there. Overflows on the side of the lake into a short canal, for example, are common.
We need to remember that the 350 000ha target is just an emergency figure for next year. Once reached the targets will need to be increased every year as we convert Zimbabwe into a farming paradise.
