USAID Partnership Transforming Zambia Into Africa’s Breadbasket
According to research undertaken by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 80 percent of smallholder farms in Zambia produce maize. Many of these smallholder farms are in isolated, hard-to-reach areas, making it difficult to transport their harvests, which, on an individual scale, are small, but collectively offer huge opportunity for the Zambian economy and nutritional wellbeing across East and Southern Africa.
In bumper years, such as the 2021/22 record maize harvest in Zambia, enormous volumes of excess maize have been produced overall by smallholder farms, leading to as many as 1.5 million metric tons of surplus corn being available for export. In spite of this, issues around storage and transport have led to maize contributing to 30% of Zambia’s total post-harvest losses.
The struggle to convert surplus maize into income for regional smallholder farms and the broader Zambian agricultural economy, however, is set to undergo extraordinary transformation in the immediate future.
In December 2022, USAID announced via the Prosper Africa Initiative that it would be joining a multi-pronged collaboration whose aim was to address the global food security crisis in the wake of the war in Ukraine and its impacts on food supply chains. Heading this joint effort would be: Africa-Global Schaffer, an agribusiness and energy firm; bechtel.org, the social impact branch of infrastructure firm Bechtel; and Empowering Farmers Foundation, the social impact arm of South Africa-based firm Export Trading Group.
This new partnership was unveiled at the US-Africa Leaders Summit 2022 held in Washington, D.C., from December 13th to December 15th, with its primary focus being to “promote shared prosperity by increasing the supply and quality of maize on the African continent”. USAID pledged to match its private sector partners’ investments in African food security 1:1. The first phase of the program will build Smart Integrated District Aggregation Centres (SIDAC) in areas where improving harvests will have the greatest impact on local economies and, more broadly, the East African trade routes to connect sellers of high-quality maize with buyers.
For Zambia, this will mean seven centres opening by the May harvest season of 2023, scaling up to twenty-three centres in the near future. The effects of such investment and improvements to infrastructure will be colossal: initially, around 100,000 metric tons of maize and other grains that would otherwise go to waste will be stored and sold each growing season.
Not only will this have transformative financial implications for farmers, but it will address grain price spikes in the region, mitigate food shortages, and prevent as many as 800 metric tons of carbon from going to waste - the equivalent of more than 80,000 gallons of diesel.
The potential of homegrown maize has become the cause of greater interest since the onset of fertiliser and food shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine. Speaking of the expectations of their union with USAID and Prosper Africa, Stu Jones, Bechtel’s Corporate Relations Manager, said, “our efforts will save lives, improve the future of the continent, and ensure sustainable outcomes”. Speaking with the Zambia News and Information Services, Julie Mellin, USAID Acting Public Affairs Officer, said that the partnership would help promote shared prosperity by increasing the supply and quality of maize on the African continent.
New supply chains enabled by the SIDAC programme will meet immediate demand, if the trends of 2022 repeat for the 2023 harvest. Faced with food shortages following the 2022 droughts, East African nations requested over 500,000 metric tons of maize, whilst regional neighbours, including Malawi, Angola, DRC, Mozambique and Namibia, requested an additional 800,000 metric tons, according to then-Agriculture Minister Reuben Mtolo in an interview with Farmers Review Africa. The 2022 maize harvest in Zambia, he added, created carryover stocks of surplus grain of 1.5 metric tons, thanks to the Food Reserve Agency’s efforts. The SIDAC programme will build on the Food Reserve Agency’s model to further reduce food waste.
European Union (EU) funding has already accelerated sustainable farming projects in Zambia, under the Sustainable Intensification of Smallholder Farming Systems in Zambia (SIFAZ) project. Established in 2018, SIFAZ was the result of a partnership between the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), and has begun to research agricultural methods for smallholder farms that were initially conceived by Feed the Future’s ‘Africa Research in Sustainable Development for the Next Generation’ (Africa RISING). By September 2022, a SIFAZ vision for sustainable maize yields had been approved by Zambia’s National Advisory Committee for the Approval of Candidate Technologies or Agronomic Practices.
The programme offered 3 agricultural formats that would grant farmers better yields while nurturing their soil – two involving incorporating grain legumes into maize fields to improve soil nitrogen content and pest management, and the third advising maize be grown on raised soil beds to improve soil oxygenation in flood-prone tracts of land. All three principles raised awareness among the Zambian farmer community of the importance of conservation agricultural approaches, namely minimal soil disturbance, soil enrichment through crop residue, and greater crop diversity.
Christian Thierfelder, a CIMMYT principal cropping systems agronomist based in southern Africa, explained the importance of these new agricultural principles to SIFAZ: “The official clearing of these transformative cropping technologies is a huge milestone for the project and for Zambia’s resource-poor farmers”. Working closely with the MoA and FAO, he added, CIMMYT was “planning research trials, demonstrations and promotion to reach 20,000 farmers as a first step”.
The significance of programmes like SIFAZ is difficult to overstate: approximately 300 million smallholder farmers grow maize in Sub-Saharan Africa, relying only on their soil and the seasonal rains. Per the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), maize covers up to 75% of cropland in East and Southern Africa and the Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA) estimates that the agricultural sector in Zambia supports livelihoods of 85% of the population. The recent announcement in November 2022, therefore, that the EU would grant SIFAZ an additional EU€20 million in funding demonstrates the globally understood importance of African maize sustainability programmes, and of the SIFAZ project in particular.
Comparative maize prices in 2022 illustrate the relevance of SIDAC’s goal of transporting surplus Zambian corn to neighbouring countries with unfulfilled demand. According to research undertaken by the American Journal of Agricultural and Biological Science, via The Conversation, market prices in Zambia were significantly below those of neighbouring nations. At the July peak, prices in Nairobi, Kenya, and Kampala, Uganda, rose above US$500/MT. Average prices in Zambia, meanwhile, were US$220/MT.
Per research conducted in the American Journal, the discrepancy of US$300/MT was double the maximum transport costs to Uganda or Kenya might have been, justifying the need for the infrastructure to export Zambian grain, connect outstanding demand with surplus supply and limit price spikes in the local region. Recent surge in demand for soybeans drove prices in East Africa above US$1000/MT; meanwhile, Zambian soybeans, enjoying a bumper harvest, were achieving a price of US$439/MT. SIDAC’s storage, and SIFAZ’s education, will create a platform to assist Zambian smallholding farmers to capitalise on market windfalls.
The future is bright, with strong funding, thorough research and new infrastructure creating a framework to combat regional food shortages, drive the Zambian agricultural economy, and, above all, empower smallholder farms to maximise their prospects.