Chief director Agriculture and Rural Advisory Services, Professor Obert Jiri stated that Zimbabwe’s government had made significant strides in the push to diversify food consumption options from bread or wheat to sweet potato to enhance food security.
"So far 2.3 million sweet potato virus-free vines have been dispensed to our farmers. The rule of thumb is that they have to be virus free in order to improve the yields," said Prof Jiri.
This is a sure case of the operationalisation of the Horticulture Recovery and Growth Plan (HRGP), which seeks to stimulate a transformative rural horticulture sub-sector under the Presidential Horticulture Scheme covering all 1, 8 million rural households.
The second round Crop and Livestock Assessment (CLA) report for 2022 showed that sweet potato yields had decreased from 422,613 tons in the 2020/2021 season to about 207,529 tons for the 2021/2022 season, a 51 percent decline.
Source: herald.co.zw