Despite forecasts of bountiful harvests and a global grain glut, lower harvests of corn, wheat and sugarcane as a result of severe weather in southern Africa are pushing up prices for Zambia’s staple foods, Reuters reports.
“Most of the farm inputs [such as seeds and chemicals] in this country are imported. That, combined with drought conditions, is pushing the cost of staples high,” Kingsley Kaswende, a researcher for the Zambia National Farmers Union, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.
In April, Reuters said, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that southern Africa’s corn harvest for the 2015/2016 season would be 15-percent lower than the average for the last five years. In Zambia, maize production fell from 3.3 million tonnes in the previous harvest to 2.6 million tonnes this year, according to the agriculture ministry.
Reuters said wheat is likely to be 59,000 metric tonnes short of demand before the next harvest, according to the Millers Association of Zambia. Sugar production similarly has declined from 424,000 tonnes last year to 380,000 this year, according to Zambia Sugar Limited, the country’s main producer.
William Chilufya of Hivos International, a Dutch-based non-governmental organization, told Reuters that a more sustainable path might be returning to traditional staple crops such as millet, sorghum and cassava, rather than depending on corn. Such alternatives “are climate-friendly, cheaper to produce and nutritious,” he said.