Watmore Makokoba
Own Correspondent
AFTER succumbing to persistent droughts, rural communities in Zvimba District have moved a step further from just growing drought resistant crops to food processing and value addition.
After securing a bountiful harvest from the last farming season, famers are now turning crops into nutritious foodstuffs through value addition at household level, thereby curbing malnutrition and poverty.
Elizabeth Msona, from ward one Murombedzi district said processing crops to foodstuffs has significantly seen her family becoming food secure and gave them an opportunity to use the little cash they get from selling other crops to other important needs such as school fees.
“We are making cakes, bread, porridge powder, fruit juice, peanut butter and fruit jam at home, this has resulted in nutritional balance and food sufficiency,
“Some of the products we make we sale them locally and get extra income for other needs”
People in Zimbabwe especially from rural areas used to eat a wider variety of traditional food which are widely professed as healthier and, however modernization has seen decline in the taking up of traditional foods.
Aquiline Mushangwe, Agritex Extension officer for the area described the initiative as the best model for fighting hunger and poverty especially for rural communities, calling for the scaling up of the program to national level so as to ensure food security at national level.
“I am very grateful to see famers in this drought prone area producing sufficient and self-reliant, there is an improvement in the uptake of the program by community members after witnessing benefits from others,
“What is needed is for such programs to upscale to other areas so that there is complete food sufficiency nationally”, said Mushangwe.
In 1995, Zimbabwe government has long established a task force to recommend sustainable solutions to curb persistent hunger and malnutrition, a policy document was prepared and in 1998 cabinet agreed to a national consultative process to transform the policy framework into a national Food and Nutrition Security Policy (FNS) and to establish the Food and Nutrition Council as a lead agency under the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC).
However due to unforeseen circumstances that befell the country culminating into economic decay, policy inconsistences and consequential fiscal constraints, the policy supposedly noble, may well said to have been overtaken by visibly manifesting effects of climate change.
The Food and agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations who are the global vanguard for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) posits that without rapid and inclusive progress in eliminating hunger and malnutrition by 2030, the full range of the goals cannot have achieved.
The battle to end hunger and poverty must be principally fought in rural areas, which is where almost 80% of the world’s hungry and poor live, therefore there is need for strong political will while also investing in the critical agents of change- stallholders, family famers, rural women and other marginalized people.
