Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development Allan Chiyembekeza has discouraged farmers from selling their maize to vendors and counting on the government to give them food aid later on.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe country is likely experience hunger. It\u2019s a natural calamity that is beyond us but we need to be responsible and take care of what we have.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy responsibility as minister (on behalf of government) is to ensure that every home is food secure but you shouldn\u2019t deliberately sell all your produce to vendors,\u201d he said at the commemoration of Global Day of Action, where civil society organisations working in nutrition enhancement held an open day in Mulanje on Friday.<\/p>\n
Chiyembekeza noted that many people are fond of selling their maize at a cheap price to vendors and end up being food insecure in the course of the year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you feel you have more than enough, don\u2019t sell to vendors. Government has set up good prices to buy maize through Admarc. During hunger, government may come in to help but can\u2019t reach out to everyone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
According to the Ministry of Agriculture\u2019s Agricultural Production Estimates Survey (Apes), there is a decline in this year\u2019s crop estimates from 3,978,123 metric tonnes in 2013\/2014 farming year to 2,898,123 metric tonnes in current farming year.<\/p>\n
Results of the third crop estimates are yet to be released.<\/p>\n
The decline in maize production has been attributed to floods and prolonged dry spell that the country experienced in the course of the season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development Allan Chiyembekeza has discouraged farmers from selling their maize to vendors and counting on the government to give them food aid later on. \u201cThe country is likely experience hunger. It\u2019s a natural calamity that is beyond us but we need to be responsible and take care of what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2211,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2212,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions\/2212"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}