In late August, Zimbabwe announced a ban on the importation of maize, the country’s staple food, citing the need to create market for local farmers. This followed data from the country’s agriculture ministry that Zimbabwe had produced 2.3 million metric tonnes (MT) of maize in the 2024/5 farming season, a bounce back from two years of food deficiency to a surplus.
According to the ministry’s data, the country had produced 2,293,556 tonnes of the staple grain, a more than threefold increase on the 635,000 metric tonnes produced in the 2023-4 cropping season when the country experienced a severe El Niño-induced drought.
With Zimbabwe requiring between 1.8 and 2 MT of maize for both human consumption and stock feed annually, the 2.3 MT produce was considered enough to justify a ban on imports.
“The estimated maize production is 2,293,556 tonnes, representing a 261 per cent increase from the production in the 2023/2024 season, illustrating the recovery from the devastating effects of the El Niño weather phenomenon experienced in the previous season,” reads part of the Second Round of Crops, Livestock and Fisheries Assessment (CLAFA2) Report produced by the Agriculture ministry in collaboration with the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZIMSTAT).
According to this report, Zimbabwe had produced a significant amount of grain, with the surplus cereal ranging from 811,732 tonnes to 1.226 million tonnes depending on various consumption patterns. It was on this basis that the government moved to impose a ban on maize imports.
“We assess the situation every day,” Obert Jiri, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture told the media when the ban was announced. “We must protect local purchases from our local farmers.”
However, despite this supposed ‘bumper harvest’, three weeks after the ban took effect, Blue Ribbon Foods, one of Zimbabwe’s major millers announced that it had closed its milling plant in Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city, because of a critical shortage of maize. Other members of the Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe (GMAZ) also corroborated this shortage of maize on the market.
Apart from poor rains and agrarian reforms that disrupted production, maize production has also been affected because of low farmer morale caused by inordinate payment delays by the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), the parastatal that, until now, was solely responsible for all grain purchases. In some cases, the parastatal had to resort to seizing the grain from farmers who were reluctant to deliver their produce because of these payment delays that sometime went into years.
Starting this year, changes were made to make GMB buy produce only from those farmers financed under government supported farming programmes, to build strategic grain reserves, with the rest of the produce being traded privately via the Zimbabwe Mercantile Exchange (ZMX), a commodities trading platform for farmers and millers.
When the shortages were first reported in late September, barely four months after the end of the harvesting period, the government first accused the millers of not telling the truth, claiming that there was abundant maize throughout the country for millers to buy, accusing them of preferring cheaper imports to locally produced crop.
The Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union (ZFU) secretary-general, Paul Zakariya, even told the media that farmers were “struggling to sell their grain” following the change in the country’s grain marketing policy.
“What we have observed is that farmers have grain. But because GMB is no longer playing its traditional aggregation role, they (farmers) are stuck with it,” Zakariya claimed.
When the situation did not improve, the government accused farmers of withholding grain from millers, before changing the narrative to blame changing consumption patterns — including the roasting of green mealies on the streets — for causing artificial shortages. However, after weeks of denial and denial about being in denial, it finally admitted that there is indeed a serious shortage of maize, lifting the ban on imports.
However, Tafadzwa Musarara, the chairman of GMAZ — whose members were directly affected by the maize shortage and led the outcry about the shortages — refused to comment on grain statistics and claims by the government that their members preferred cheaper imports to locally produced maize. He referred Down To Earth (DTE) to the association’s spokesperson, Adolf Chirimuuta, who also downplayed the role of the false statistics in the crisis.
“Things have changed now, the issue has been overtaken by events... the new developments are that grain is now officially being imported and no farmers are complaining about lack of markets,” Chirimuuta said.
Collen Tapfumaneyi, the chief executive officer of the ZMX private commodities exchange platform that is now supposed to handle maize transactions the open market, declined to share details about how much the platform handled until the time the country ran out of the commodity.
For nearly three weeks, Brian James, from the Citizens for Change Coalition party who is the main opposition party’s shadow Agriculture minister assured DTE that he was gathering information on what really transpired in the country’s food supply situation, only to then decline comment.
When asked to comment on this sudden swing from ‘surplus’ to a serious deficit, Jiri, the agriculture ministry permanent secretary, referred DTE to the explanation provided in the post-harvest report.
“CLAFA2 deals with estimates of production on standing crop; and CLAFA3 (also known as Post-Harvest Survey—PHS) deals with actual harvest and consumption and stored grain,” he said.
In this 2024/2025 PHS report, also produced by the ministry and Zimbabwe’s statistics agency ZIMSTAT in September, the harvest is reduced from the 2.3 MT to just over 1.8 MT, and of this quantity, another 470,000 tonnes cannot be adequately accounted for.
“Out of the 1,819,819 MT of maize produced during the 2024/2025 agriculture season, 279,448 MT (15.4 per cent) were consumed between April and August 2025, and 1,064,510 MT (58.5 per cent) were in stock,” the report says. “The balance of 475,861 metric tonnes can be attributed to sales and post-harvest losses recorded during the same period. The maize in stock is expected to cover the period September 2025 to May 2026.”
The report said the 23 per cent disparity between the CLAFA2 estimates in cereal production vis-à-vis the PHS results is ascribed to “various factors, including the consumption of green mealies, cereal sales, early drying of cereals for consumption to cushion the extended effects of the 2023/24 El Niño induced drought, silage usage, field and post-harvest losses, and other residual variables.”
In June the United States Department of Agriculture, after doing its own survey, had shared data indicating that Zimbabwe’s maize production would be approximately 1.3 MT. This figure corresponds with the final figure of 1,43,958 tonnes that the government could account for in its final PHS report. This effectively took away the over a million tonnes in ‘surplus’ maize factored in the CLAFA2 data, leaving the country in a precarious food situation.
Socio-economic analyst, Rashweat Mukundu told DTE that while there is no doubt that there is an improvement in agricultural production, including that of maize, the problem has been that of exaggerating the data to for political reasons.
“There is a politicisation of the figures and exaggeration of the output for political ends,” Mukundu said. “It seems that our institutions that calculate economic growth, institutions that look into economic indexes, are too politicised to speak the truth to power, so in the end there is an overestimation, an exaggeration, of our agricultural output, which however, is exposed when we face these deficits that we are seeing.”
He said the exaggerations of figures also extends to other crops such as wheat and soy.
Members of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ruling ZANU-PF party who are pushing for constitutional changes that would allow him to continue beyond the two five-year term limit, are doing everything to portray him as a reformer and champion who is spearheading the country’s economic transformation.
“But at the end of the day, one question comes to haunt us, the question that the political leadership cannot answer: why do we need to lift an import ban when we are being told that our silos are over spilling?” Mukundu said. “I think this is case of politicisation of economic planning, a politicisation of economic analysis; if our institutions that do these calculations are independent, then we won’t find ourselves in this situation.”
He said the problem with these gross exaggerations is that they always make it hard for citizens to plan, as in this case where one moment they are made to believe that there is enough food for them, only to face the reality that actually there is a crisis in terms of meeting the national food demand.