•smallholder gross profits for cabbage, tomatoes and onion is much more profitable compared to maize.

By JOWIT SALUSEKI –

ZAMBIA has recently been experiencing about 10 per cent growth in the agriculture sector but this has not resulted in any meaningful significant reduction in rural poverty.
Despite the agriculture sector recording increased investments, a huge chunk of the money goes to support two programmes namely; the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) and Food Reserve Agency (FRA).
This leaves a paltry budget to support other programmes such as crop production and diversification, research extension, irrigation, livestock and fisheries, which are key drivers of the sector.
The area under irrigation still remains low with majority of smallholders not able to afford irrigation technologies while investment in value addition especially at the farm level has also eluded the sector.
In order to reduce poverty among households, since 2002, the Government of Zambia has been supporting farmers by offering them subsidised inputs under the FISP programme.
Thus during the 2015/16 farming season, a million farmers are going to benefit from the FISP out of which 759,000 would benefit from the conventional way while 241,000 would access their farming inputs through the newly introduced E-voucher system.
The 2014/15 farming season witnessed a total of 900,000 farmers targeted with each beneficiary getting four bags of both basal and top dressing fertiliser as well as 10 kg of maize seed.
In addition, 12,700 farmers were targeted for the rice pack, 23,820 for sorghum and 67,855 were targeted for the groundnuts packs.
According to the Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI), Zambia’s policy focus since independence on a single maize crop has adversely affected the other sub-sectors such as smallholder
horticulture.
Maize continues to rank very high in the country’s crop performance with the area put under the crop increasing by 5.3 per cent during the 2014/15 production season.
Recently, the production levels of other crops had remained comparatively low due to the extended dry spells experienced in the, southern half of the country during the last growing season.
Official production estimates from the Ministry of Agriculture shows a significant drop of 22 per cent in maize production.
This has been partly attributed to poor productivity levels among small scale farmers and also due to wilting of the crop because of prolonged dry spells, hence, maize production for the 2014/15
production season had been pegged at 2.62 million tonnes.
For the past decade, over 50 per cent of agricultural budget has been spent on maize input and output subsidies, an experience that has only benefited a minority group of farmers.
The Government has however put in place a number of initiatives to counteract this situation and build resilience at the household level.
The State intends to redesign the FISP, strengthen research, invest in irrigation, rehabilitate and develop rural infrastructure, reform the agricultural marketing system, promote crop diversification and value
addition.
Some school of thought argue that over dependence on maize production is not good for the country, therefore farmers should diversify into crop production.
However, horticulture which has a potential avenue for poverty reduction has its own bottlenecks in the sense that land constrained farmers tends to be poor in income and assets.
Although horticulture production requires high use of cash inputs and is knowledge intensive, smallholder gross profits for cabbage, tomatoes and onion is much more profitable compared to maize.
The Rural Agricultural Livelihood Survey of 2012 shows that the value of production per capita (per person) of horticultural crops was estimated to be 1.38 times higher more than that of maize.
While horticultural production is viable, factors such as gender, age, and infrastructure and price variability, among others have an influence on small holder participation in horticultural markets.
For instance, female headed households are more likely to participate in horticulture than maize market since investments in the horticultural sector can offer greater opportunities for women in terms of commercialisation, income growth and poverty reduction than the maize sector.
On the other hand, households headed by relatively younger people are more likely to participate in horticultural production than cereal as youths are much more able to navigate over the current horticultural marketing system and constraints than older households.
However the challenge with horticultural production and marketing is that it’s concentrated in areas with good road networks, therefore proximity to good road infrastructure significantly increase the
probability of small scale farmers to participate in vegetable growing.
In its recommendations to the Government, IAPRI suggests a move away from the maize-centric policies and diversify to allow growth in sub-sectors such as horticulture.
The institute further recommends for a flexible e-voucher system to include horticulture input support under FISP, to benefit horticulture farmers who do not wish to produce maize.
And in his presentation during a recent media breakfast budget meeting at Lusaka’s Pamodzi Hotel, IAPRI research analyst Auckland Kuteya commended Government for introducing the E-voucher pilot, saying the project would provide small-scale farmers a wider choice of inputs and
promote agricultural diversification.
“The E-voucher pilot would also increase private sector participation in input market, timely supply of agricultural inputs which would result in greater economical multi-supplier effect’’, Mr Kuteya said.
Mr Kuteya recommended among other things the increase in funding to the fisheries and livestock departments and improved timing of budget releases and limitation of the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) in maize market.
He further called on Government to uphold the Maputo Declaration of allocating at least 10 per cent of public expenditure to the agricultural sector.
Minister of Agriculture Given Lubinda said the decline in allocation to the FISP in the 2016 Budget has been necessitated by the ongoing infrastructure development such as the construction of roads.
In the 2016 budget, the Government has allocated K1 billion to FISP down from K1.1 billion which was allocated in the 2015 budget.