BY HARRIET CHIKANDIWA GOVERNMENT says it is targeting to drill 35 000 boreholes in rural areas by 2025 to improve water supply for irrigation projects.
Lands deputy minister Davis Marapira revealed this in Parliament while responding to questions from legislators on Wednesday.
“Government policy we have in place is to say all the water bodies in this country are the ones that we are giving attention to. We are actually developing and channelling them towards irrigation,” he said.
“We are actually busy drilling boreholes and by 2025, we look forward to having drilled 35 000 village by village but for now we are focusing on two boreholes per ward. We are not choosing boreholes according to agrological natural regional confirmation, but what we are doing is we are going to provide boreholes to every village.
“So every constituency where you are coming from, if it is not an urbanised constituency, you are going to have two boreholes per village by 2025. The drilling of boreholes is meant for our villages. We want to drill 35 000 boreholes by 2025 and that has nothing to do with politics.”
Marapira said the current government focus on irrigation development was necessitated by the country’s erratic rainfall pattern over the past few years.
“The other challenge we are having is that our contractors are not giving inputs to our farmers on time, which again affects production of farmers, especially where the rainfall is good,” he pointed out.
“We have to look at all those factors before we can conclude that the provision of inputs to farmers is bad. It should be done properly with every farmer getting his or her inputs at the right time and are able to plant at the correct time.”
- Chamisa under fire over US$120K donation
- Mavhunga puts DeMbare into Chibuku quarterfinals
- Pension funds bet on Cabora Bassa oilfields
- Councils defy govt fire tender directive
Keep Reading
Marapira also indicated that the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) was not the sole buyer of maize and neither does it have a monopoly.
“The ministry has pronounced the need for users of agricultural raw materials to sponsor and contract at least 40% of their annual requirements.
“We have a lot of companies who are contracting farmers; they should only buy what they have contracted. We have the government and through the Presidential Inputs Scheme, they have given us a lot of inputs and those inputs should be delivered to the Grain Marketing Board.
“At the same time, we have the government through the Agro-Yield Programmes; they finance a lot of inputs. If there is no control of marketing into contractors and marketing into GMB, there will be rampant side marketing activity within the country,” he warned
Marapira said government had a right to superintend over farming activities which they fund, but pointed out that it would not go to a farmer and take everything.
“We will take to GMB what is reasonable and leave what is reasonable for the farmers’ workers and animals,” he told legislators.
- Follow us on Twitter @NewsDayZimbabwe
