Time ripe to combat drought

| Thursday March 21, 2013 00:00

Driving across some parts of the country, particularly the southern part, one is greeted by withered crops in our fields.  You are forced to digest the bitter fact that the majority, if not all of these fields that have become literally cemeteries of dead crops were ploughed using government or taxpayer's money.  Surely it is high time we came up with better strategies to combat these perennial and crippling droughts.

First, it has been established, empirically, that maize is easily affected by water shortages or high temperatures that we are witnessing in this country.  Secondly, it is a known fact that sorghum has the capacity to withstand dry conditions and high temperatures.  Therefore, government departments such as the Meteorological Services Department and the Department of Crop Production at the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) must come up with a comprehensive strategy or system on information sharing.

Over the past two to three years, the government has spent millions of Pula trying to promote agriculture through the Integrated Support Programme for Arable Agriculture Development (ISPAAD), but it seems these efforts have been fruitless.  Time has come to halt the present indiscriminate supply of seeds across the country and casual approach to the farming sector.

The MoA should now demarcate the country into ploughing zones for different crops and different timeframes, using information from Met Services. For instance, many people ploughed thousands of hectares of maize, but from which they are going to yield nothing.  We have a serious shortage of sorghum, and that is why Botswana had to import thousands of tonnes of sorghum from Australia last year, when we could have produced that right here at home. As an incentive for farmers to plough sorghum, and other drought-resistant crops, government should only supply those seeds for drought-prone areas while those who want to plough maize can do it at their own cost.

This can be reviewed every year looking at the information provided by the Met Services on rainfall projections. When we learnt that ISPAAD was being reviewed more than a year ago, we were hopeful that these things would be taken into consideration to make the programme more productive.  However, it is never too late and these can still be considered and implemented in the coming ploughing season. Sorghum, the staple for most Batswana, has become so expensive and scarce and therefore there should be no reason for local farmers not to grab this opportunity and plough it and ensure our food security.

                                                       Today's thought

'Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there.  Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?'

                                                   - Bernice Fitz-Gibbon