THE fact that some small-scale farmers in Sinda District, Eastern Province, who are recipients of government support through the e-voucher system and the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) are pleading with agro dealers to give them cash so they can buy food rather than farming inputs demonstrates how vulnerable some citizens have become to hunger.
These desperate small-scale farmers are well aware that their decision to trade inputs for cash could have negative effects on crop yields and jeopardise the nation’s food security. This is regrettable.
We are worried that some small-scale farmers opted to transform their farming inputs into cash, which could lead to a food crisis when the country has recorded a decent amount of rainfall in the 2024/2025 farming season . We believe that this could have been prevented.
We believe that it is normal for the farmers to focus on meeting their immediate survival needs by turning their agricultural inputs into cash and then worry about the potential repercussions of food insecurity later on. It is expecetd. It’s a natural human response to need.
According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, survival needs must be satisfied before the individual can satisfy the higher needs.
It is our opinion that government should start with the distribution of relief food, especially in hunger-stricken areas, to ensure that peasant farmers have enough to eat so that they are not tempted to connive with agro dealers to exchange their agricultural inputs for hard cash as the case was in Sinda.
However, we believe that government should update its social safety net programmes such as e-voucher and FISP to incorporate the food component so that farmers can have access to enough food to eat while inputs are being distributed, particularly from October to December, which is the planting season, each year.
We say this because the farmers need to have food for them to have the strength to work their fields and to plant maize, sorghum, beans, groundnuts and other crops.
In this respect, we share the concerns of Dyman Mvula, the chairperson of the Sinda district agriculture committee, that some farmers connived with agro dealers and exchanged fertiliser, seed and chemicals for cash , which they used to buy mealie -meal, maize and other necessities.
“But to give a farmer hard cash than inputs is a robbery to the government. The distribution of inputs was okay, although farmers were saying the system was quite hard to[for] them because government wanted to reduce theft. And truly, this year it was a challenge for thieves to steal what belonged to the farmer. Those that were suspected to be thieves of farming inputs found it hard to dribble [the farmers] because of the measures taken by government.
“The big problem that I observed is that some agro dealers were agreeing with a farmer that instead of giving them farming inputs, they were giving them money as hard cash and some of those monies the farmer would end up buying food because of the hunger situation which is in the communities, meaning whoever got money from the agro dealer instead of inputs did not apply the inputs in their farming activities,” Mvula said.
We urge Agriculture minister Mtolo Phiri to keep a careful eye on agro dealers who collude with small-scale farmers to trade agricultural inputs for money – they should be blacklisted. We think that many other regions of the nation were also affected by these illegalities, in addition to Sinda District.
Such activities, in our opinion, undermine the goal of FISP, which is to provide small-scale farmers with access to affordable agricultural supplies to boost their production for household and national food security.
We worry that communities will continue to grapple with food insecurity if this is not addressed, even in times when the country receives enough rainfall while the government will continue spending huge sums of money on humanitarian aid to feed citizens affected by hunger. We need to break this cycle.
