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The parliamentary committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources has advised government to set aside money to import maize to beef up the stocks that are in the Strategic Grain Reserves (SGR) in preparation for the looming hunger.
Committee chair Vitus Dzoole Mwale said members of the committee toured all the three regions of the country to assess the hunger situation and found that many people are facing severe food shortages resulting from the month-long dry spell that hit the country at the time maize was tasselling.
But Dzoole Mwale could not disclose actual figures of people facing hunger in the country, saying he is waiting for results from the group that toured the Southern and Northern regions but said about half of the households in the Centre have been adversely affected by the dry spell.
“I would not say everything that we have found until Parliament meets but we can’t wait to say there is great hunger in the country. I led the group that toured the Centre and found that Kasungu and Ntchisi were also hit by hailstorm before the dry spell and they will not harvest anything.
“In the North I am told Rumphi and Karonga were seriously affected while in the South we have Mwanza, Chikwawa, Nsanje and Mangochi where the crop has completely withered. We are yet to compile the actual figures but what I can say is that there is disaster this year and government should start preparing for the hunger. Right now while there is still plenty of time,” said Dzoole Mwale.
The committee said the impending hunger would be reduced if government embarked on winter cropping and small scale irrigation farming since rain has started coming again.
“Apart from importing the maize, government would also be wise if it thought of winter cropping and small scale irrigation farming since the rains have started coming again,” said Mwale.
The agriculture committee was on a week-long tour of the country to assess the maize situation and come up with recommendations to government, monitor the target input programme and assess its impact, find out the successes and failures of the fertilizer subsidy among others.
In a related development, secretary for Agriculture Andrew Daudi says his ministry will come up with fresh crop estimates following the dry spell that has damaged crops country-wide.
Daudi said the ministry can no longer rely on the estimates it released last month as they were conducted just at the onset of the spell.
“We will release fresh estimates at the end of March and these will give the actual amount of food the country will harvest. We can’t trust the previous estimates because we conducted the crop assessment at the beginning of the dry spell and we did not know it would persist,” said Daudi.
Daudi also welcomed the resumption of the rains last week, saying some crops will be resuscitated although others will not be revived and added that the rains can be used for planting other food crops such as rice, potato and cassava.
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