BY BANELE MAGONGO
MBABANE– Government has secured E70 million for the rehabilitation of the Rural Development Areas (RDAs).
This will be done over the next three years.
Prime Minister Russell Dlamini revealed this today during a meeting with the Eswatini Editors Forum.
On the concerns over the rising cost of living and imported inflation on food, the premier addressed a query about the Agriculture Minister’s visit to key national development projects.
He shed light on the findings of Minister of Agriculture Mandla Tshawuka during his visits to key national projects. He mentioned that the Tshawuka witnessed first-hand the severe deterioration of the infrastructure in the RDAs, including the state of accommodation for extension staff and offices.
Dlamini stated that Microprojects was entrusted with assessing the extent of dilapidation and the cost of rehabilitation for RDAs. This led to the government securing a budget of E70 million annually for three years to rehabilitate the RDAs. Furthermore, the Ministry of Agriculture is streamlining its parastatals to ensure they deliver on their core mandates. Concurrently, strategies, initiatives, and action plans are in the works to enhance and increase local production, with the goal of achieving staple food sovereignty in the near future.
The Ministry of Agriculture’s strategies include identifying high-yielding areas within the country, where farmers will be clustered and supported with resources (financial, material, human, and technical) to increase maize yields and advance the country towards self-sufficiency. The Ministry also intends to identify arable public and private farms to partner with in planting essential crops while utilising government-owned arable farms for staple grain production. The construction and commissioning of a national grain reserve with a three-year staple grain storage capacity is another significant project being undertaken by the government, aiming to provide a buffer against future food security challenges.
Among these initiatives has been the identification of the high yielding areas in the country with a view of clustering farmers in these areas and concentrating efforts (financial, material, human and technical) to remove the current bottlenecks so that these areas can realise their full potential in terms of maize yields towards our desired self-reliance goal.
Additionally, the Ministry of Agriculture is also embarking on identifying arable farms both public and private where the intention is to partner with the private owners and plant the relevant crops while also utilising the arable government farms to produce our stable grains. The construction and commissioning of a strategic national grain reserve is one of the major projects to be undertaken by Government with a three-year staple grain storage capacity to cushion the country in times of need.
