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| Amon Daka packing bananas for sale beyond Nyimba |
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| A Banana plantation in Nyimba-PICTURES BY DOREEN NAWA |
FOR smallholders in Nyimba district in Eastern Province, low yields and decreased incomes in their banana farming activities are part of their daily complaints.
Amon Daka, a 40-year-old smallholder who lives in the remote Chamilala village, east of Nyimba district, says his agricultural productivity has been a mixture of hope and despair as he always records miserable yields.
In cases where the yield is impressive, post-harvest losses will always bring his expected income down.
For Mr Daka and other smallholder banana farmers in Nyimba, the major problem has been access to the market in terms of transport and stiff competition, storage facilities and change in weather pattern that has contributed to a drop in yields each year.
Another major problem is the lack of adequate information on best farming practices such as when and how to plant the bananas, which has also led to a decrease in productivity, less income from their produce, contributing to low living standards in the area.
“I have been in banana production for over 20 years now. Before then, the business was lucrative because there was no much competition. We had few people that were involved in the banana production, giving the few of us enough room to market our produce,” Mr Daka says.
Mr Daka says the struggles in the banana production in Nyimba are discouraging not only to seasonal farmers but young farmers that want to venture into the production.
“Youngsters endure probably the most from these losses. They do not have the patience to wait like we do. I think something needs to be done to cushion what we are faced with and give life to banana farming here in Nyimba,” Mr Daka says.
The story is not different for 44-year-old Esther Tembo, who says banana farming has been unproductive for her.
“I always lack money to transport my produce to places beyond Nyimba, I have tried in these years to cultivate more by clearing land and planting new banana suckers but the weather has not been good for my farming activities,” she says.
Ms Tembo has an enormous smile when she just harvests her bananas on her small rural farm 45 kilometres north of Nyimba district.
However, the smile shortly turns to a glare when the topic turns to marketing her fruit.
Like most farmers in Nyimba, Mrs Tembo sells her crops by means of native brokers, who purchase instantly from farmers and then transport the produce to major markets in Lusaka.
Brokers are extensively disliked by growers, Mrs Tembo says, due to their unreliability and pay a pittance for their crops.
Nevertheless, farmers have little option but to sell to them.
They lack storage facilities to maintain their perishable crops.
“The brokers are not good,” Mrs Tembo says, recalling how much profit she would have made if she had a reliable place to sell her produce.
And once the brokers get to banana farmers in Nyimba, they paid only K2 to K4 per kilogram, a far cry from the K1 per fruit bananas have been fetching in Lusaka.
She says her year-end seasonal sales were disastrous. She only sold one-quarter of the bananas she grew, the remaining have been left to rot behind her house.
“Even the local market here is not different, we sell to travellers and the competition is stiff. It would have been better if we had maybe an industry to process and add value to the bananas, like drying them,” Mrs Tembo says.
According to statistics at Nyimba District Farmers Association, Nyimba has over 1,000 women farmers that are involved in banana production in small plantations in the area.
Yet, regardless of these statistics, little has been achieved to curb post-harvest food losses and lack of access to reliable markets in Nyimba in many years.
With better market, better storage value addition and technology, rural farmers could have a chance to develop high-profit products and transform their livelihoods.
Nyimba District Commissioner Peter Kaisa says bananas in Nyimba have high potential and the production can effectively contribute to economic growth in the country as well as alleviate poverty among the people of Nyimba.For Colonel Kaisa, value addition to bananas is the best way of reshaping production.
He says the district is seeking ways and avenues of how local farmers could get to process the bananas into various products and retail them.
“We have a lot of bananas that go to waste due to lack of post-harvest storage facilities. On our own, we cannot manage, we need people to assist us invest in appropriate technology that will ease value addition,”
Col Kaisa says substantial amounts of bananas are thrown away particularly during the peak harvesting season and even higher volumes incur some degree of quality deterioration leading to lower selling price.
Considering that bananas are perishable foods, Col Kaisa says farmers lose a lot especially when they are not sold on time.
“With all these challenges, we need partners that can commercialise the production of bananas in Nyimba,” Col Kaisa says.
Col Kaisa says the role of the smallholder producer is extremely important especially in Zambia in terms of creating jobs, but in order to succeed, agriculture has to be transformed.
He says what is needed is innovation and inclusion of technology into agriculture so that smallholders can see high yields and also improve their incomes, livelihoods and the economy.
Col Kaisa says public-private sector partnership is essential to improve access to markets and value addition technologies for smallholder farmers.
“The public and private sectors must work together to help us reshape the banana production here. With technology, a lot can be achieved in terms of mitigating the daily struggles that our smallholder farmers go through in producing bananas,” Col Kaisa says.
Col Kaisa says leveraging on increased investment by the private sector in sourcing from farmers responsibly provides an opportunity to integrate post-harvest losses interventions to demonstrate the business case and value proposition to catalyse system change.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, post-harvest losses is a serious problem in Africa.
The fruit and vegetable losses are estimated to be 50 percent or more.
This estimate is cumulative because losses occur at every stage of the supply chain from production to consumption.
Losses on farm level can be attributed to poor harvest practices and poor handling, and lack of timely access to the market. PUBLISHED IN THE ZAMBIA DAILY MAIL ON MAY 5, 2019. LINK: http://www.daily-mail.co.zm/need-to-reshape-banana-production-in-nyimba-district/
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