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Zimbabwe: COVID-19 - Zimbabwe's Smallholder Farmers Step Into the Food Supply Gap

Source: Allafrica.com

Bulawayo, Zimbabwe' second city of some 700,000 people, has experienced a shortage of vegetables this year, with major producers citing a range of challenges from poor rains to the inability to access to bank loans to finance their operations. But this shortage has created a market gap that Zimbabwe smallholders - some 1.5 million people according to government figures - have an opportunity to fill.

"Smallholder farmers are the highest producers of diverse food crops, some estimate that they supply over 80 percent of what many of us [in the whole country] are even currently consuming," Nelson Mudzingwa, the National Coordinator of the Zimbabwe Small Holder Organic Farmers Forum (ZIMSOFF), the local chapter of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers Forum (ESAFF), told IPS.