Zambia Declares Drought

By Kalata News

Lusaka 1/03/24 – THE Zambian Government has this week declared a drought and the 2023 harvest season a national disaster.

Making the declaration at State House, the Zambian President Mr. Hakainde Hichilema said his surveys conducted by the Disaster Mitigation and Management Unit (DMMU) and other governmental agencies estimated a loss of crop in two million hectares out of the three million planted.

President Hichilema also said 84 districts out of 116 districts were affected by this drought caused by El Nino.

Zambia has experience normal to below normal rainfall and according to the Zambezi River Authority (ZRA) and the Zambia Meteorological Department, this dry spell is expected to continue affecting the southern half of the country from February up to end of April.

“This drought has devastating consequences on many critical sectors such as agriculture, water availability, and energy supply, risking our national food security and livelihoods of millions of our people. This also negatively affects our economic development programme.

The destruction caused by the prolonged dry spell is immense, with 84 severely affected districts in Lusaka, Central, Copperbelt eastern, North-western, Western, and Southern provinces.

At national level the estimated planted area for maize is 2.2 million hectares and of this, approximately 1 million hectares has been destroyed,” announced President Hichilema.

 

He called on his Government’s budget to be re-aligned to divert resources to where they would be needed to mitigate and fight the effects of the drought.

Among the pleas he made included asking the Zambian farmers to regrow their fields using irrigations schemes and other alternatives.

In response, Jervis Zimba, President of the Zambian National Farmers Union (ZNFU) welcomed the declaration of drought as a national disaster by the President Mr. Hichilema and the measures that will be taken to mitigate and resolve the negative effects of this drought.

Zimba said ZNFU was pleased that Government wanted to partner with farmers to avail themselves to produce food this year to reduce on expected harvest deficit.

“The Union embraces this and is available to participate in the team effort under the various streams that will be established. Our desire will be to see that actions of the dialogue processes are implemented in a fast-paced manner synonymous with emergency as the situation demands so that the outcome is felt,” says ZNFU President Jervis Zimba.

 

He said the Union was of the view, that long term solutions must involve providing incentives that are easy to access by farmers and removal of legal impediments that exist including amending certain clauses in the Water Resources and Management Act of 2011 that hinder water harvesting.

As Zambia seeks abroad for help, President Hichilema was short of asking Zambians to embrace superior seeds from the Genetically Modified organisms (GMOs) in order to produce more or avoid the effects of prolonged dry spells on the land.

He said this time his government would do what no other government had done and that includes seeking alternative energy sources such as nuclear power and seeking GMOs to ensure farmers have high yields from their labour.

“This would be a revolution like no other”, he warned.

Zambia has been supplying its food stock to its neighbours Congo (DRC) and Malawi and in the recent past was importing GMO maiz to feed these nations.