By Ed Stoddard and Chris Mfula
MALAKATA, Zambia, June 20 (Reuters) - Peasant farmer Joseph Mhlanga proudly points to the pile of maize or corn cobs in his modest house: a good crop for him that is part of Zambia's bumper harvest this year.
"This is my maize from this year. I plan to start shelling it soon," said Mhlanga, a spry 76-year-old retired school teacher who farms a two-hectare plot in a village just north of Zambia's capital Lusaka.
Zambia is expected to harvest over 3 million tonnes of maize, its life-blood crop, for its 2010/11 season compared to 2.8 million tonnes last year, resulting in a surplus of 1.6 million tonnes.
Mhlanga says he has benefited from two things: a government subsidy program that provides fertilizer and seeds to peasants and new farming methods aimed at boosting yields
Food security will be high on the agenda of a G20 meeting of farm ministers in France this week as prices soar for staple products that feed the world, hitting the poor the hardest.
Bolstering farm output through investments and the use of technologies will be a key theme at the meeting, expected to be a forum in which tighter regulation and more open exchanges on food stock data are debated.
LITTLE GOES A LONG WAY
In some countries a little has gone a long way and Zambia is a case in point: modest help to poor farmers and new techniques are giving hope on a continent that largely missed out of the green revolution that lifted grain output elsewhere.
In Zambia, one of the world's poorest countries, raising yields is a top government priority but it is also seen saving the government money in the long run.
"It is good for political stability because it ensures food security at the household and national level while also providing income to the rural population," said Chibamba Kanyama, an analyst with the Economics Association of Zambia, a think tank.
"The government has found it cheaper to subsidize maize production instead of importing the staple food," he said.
There is a political dimension here too as the programme has discouraged rural migration to urban areas and the governing Movement for Multiparty Democracy's support base is in the countryside and among the peasantry.
Increased investment in farming is key to tackling rising food prices, the OECD said on Friday, issuing a joint report with the UN's food body predicting world farm commodity prices would keep pushing higher this decade.
Neighbouring Malawi has a programme similar to Zambia's that has also lifted grain output but an aid row with former colonial ruler Britain has put it at risk.
NO PLOUGHING, CROP ROTATION
Mhlanga said since he switched to "conservation farming" methods and started getting government inputs about two years ago, he has lifted his crop by around 20 percent.
Mhlanga said he no longer ploughs but concentrates his fertilizer in holes or basins where he directly plants his crop.
"You lose too much soil from wind and other things ploughing. And you exhaust it," he said as he walked through a section of his plot which lies fallow during the brief and mild Zambian winter.
He also takes his weeds and digs them back into the soil for additional compost and rotates his crop.
"See, I grew maize here this season but next season I will plant cotton here and maize over there. If you have groundnuts then the next year you will have good nitrogen there for something else," he said, pointing to his field.
Mhlanga reckons he will get 50 bags of maize this year weighing 50-kgs (110 pounds) each.
He says about 20 will feed him and his family while he will sell the rest to the government's food reserve agency, which will give him 65,000 kwacha ($13.50) for each 50-kg bag.
From that you would subtract 10,000 kwachaa a bag to have someone deliver it for you on a truck. So a Zambian peasant farmer lives on the edge at the best of times and a bad harvest can be ruinous.
If you sell to the state it takes about two weeks to get your money but private road-side traders will give you cash immediately but offer half the price.
Down the road, Catherine Tembo, 42, carrying one of her eight children, stands by a roadside post where private traders were weighing and paying for bags of maize delivered by other women in her village.
"When I sell mine, I will sell some here and some to the state. These traders pay less but sometimes you need money," she said.
She said she was grateful for the government subsidy which she reckoned saved her about $65. The programme provides farmers with four 50-kg bags of fertilizer and one bag of seed.
It used to be double that but the government cut it in half while increasing the number of recipients which this past season stood at 890,000 farmers from 500,000 the year before.
The government also wants peasants to farm smaller, more manageable plots in an effort to boost yields.
Not everyone likes the cuts and some complain that the inputs come too late. Depending on the rains much of the Zambian maize crop is planted in November and farmer Collins Mweemba, who also delivers maize for others, complained that last year he did not get it before December.
"They come late and we need more inputs," he said.
Mhlanga, however, has only one complaint.
"Farming is hard work. I'm old now, I need to young men to dig my holes for me but they don't want to, they say the work is too hard," he said.
(Editing by Keiron Henderson)
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