Cathy Buckle: When maize shortages tell a different story

Key topics:Grain shortage exposes inflated maize harvest claimsVillagers forced into “mandatory” maize contributionsImport ban and levy risk worsening Zimbabwe’s food crisis.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Cathy Buckle.Dear Family and Friends,Come and sit with me under the Msasa tree, where the new leaves are soft and green, and listen to my strange story where nothing is as it seems and where a gift is not a gift. Sometimes eyebrows go up, oftentimes lips are sealed, and always we have to read between the lines. This is one of those stories. A couple of months ago, Zimbabwe’s Lands and Agriculture Minister, Anxious Masuka, announced that we’d had a bumper harvest, producing 2.9 million tonnes of maize, well above our national requirement of 2.2 million tonnes. The government then introduced a ban on importing grain. But somewhere along the line, something wasn’t right because a couple of weeks ago, Blue Ribbon Foods, Zimbabwe’s second largest milling company, halted operations at its Bulawayo plant because there was an acute shortage of grain on the local market. “We have seven silos outside that hold about 180 tonnes each. They have all been empty since April,” they said. Blue Ribbon Foods normally runs two shifts a day, producing up to 60 tonnes of maize meal a day. “Our workers are hanging in the balance,” they said, while reports came in that several other milling companies had already downsized or laid off workers due to shortages of maize.“We used to get maize locally, easily,” said David Moyo, chairman of the Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe’s Southern Region. “Some days, all we get is two or three 50kg bags. It can take a whole week just to fill a one-tonne truck.Read more:.Cathy Buckle: The threads that connect us to Zimbabwe.Meanwhile, back in the dusty village, tempers were frayed. Government officials had arrived and called a meeting. Each of the 200 homesteads in the village had to surrender 10kg of maize in what was called a ‘mandatory contribution.’ Announced at a Zanu PF meeting in Masvingo in late June 2025, this was a new directive whereby beneficiaries of agricultural inputs under the Presidential Inputs Scheme now have to pay back their gift in the form of 10kg of grain, which will go into the country’s Strategic Grain Reserve, they were told. Villagers did not know about this new directive; they had thought that a gift was a gift, but the Ministry of Lands’ Permanent Secretary said it was a "mandatory contribution" and "a gesture of appreciation to President Emmerson Mnangagwa." The government took 2 tonnes of maize from that one village that day. No one knew if their ‘mandatory contribution’ had anything to do with what was now a very obvious shortage of maize available for millers to keep producing maize meal.Next came reports from Jacques Pienaar of Commodity Insight Africa, who said the government’s reluctance to lift the ban on imports was “political” and could trigger a major food crisis if it wasn’t urgently reversed. He estimated Zimbabwe needed to import an extra 1.1 million tonnes of maize. “If the government does not move with speed to reopen the borders for grain imports, the country will be in the throes of a shortage within weeks,” Pienaar said.A few days ago, the government reversed their ban on grain imports but added a levy to imports at the same time, indicating that prices will inevitably have to go up for ordinary consumers. The last words in this strange story are from Zimbabwean economist Tinashe Murapata, who said: “Zimbabwe’s maize production was around one million metric tonnes and not the 2.3 million metric tonnes the 2025 budget envisaged.” He added, “The rather big question is how did we get the numbers so flagrantly wrong?” Gifts that aren’t gifts, mandatory contributions and numbers that are flagrantly wrong are the words, the;sights are those empty silos, empty grain depots and empty pallets that we can all see every day as we go past Zimbabwe’s grain storage facilities..There is no charge for this Letter From Zimbabwe, but if you would like to donate, please visit my website. A home audio recording of this Letter is available for a small contribution to the mailing expense. Please email cbuckle.zim@gmail.com if you are interested.Until next time, thanks for reading this Letter From Zimbabwe, now in its 25th year, and my books about life in Zimbabwe, a country in waiting.Ndini shamwari yenyu (I am your friend)Love Cathy 26 September 2025. Copyright © Cathy Buckle https://cathybuckle.co.zw/ My new Photobook “Zimbabwe’s Timeless Beauty The 2025 Collection” and my Beautiful Zimbabwe 2026 Calendar are now available. They can both be ordered from my website or from LULU. Click here to order www.lulu.com/spotlight/cathybuckle2018

Cathy Buckle: When maize shortages tell a different story

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