A Gweru farmer’s claims that he produces wheat to manufacture bread without using imported ingredients have found little takers among industry experts.
The Gweru farmer, Douglas Kwande, assured a Cabinet meeting last week that he could produce a standard loaf of bread using locally-produced wheat alone.
However, a Gweru-based baker who has been in the industry for over 19 years, Hardlife Mamuse is not convinced. Said Mamuse:
The local wheat flour is good, but it does not reach the desired quality. For example, it is dense. In other words, it is heavy. Its own quality, therefore, must be improved by wheat from outside the country mostly countries in Europe like Lithuania which have high-quality wheat.
I do not know if it is because of climatic conditions or what, but what I can confirm is that as a country we mainly produce brown wheat for brown bread. There is very low production of white wheat and actually, I am not aware of farmers who produce white wheat. It’s imported, so if we say the country can rely on local wheat only, there will be serious shortages of white bread.
Its time bakers think of health rather.
I’m not sure how he thinks he’s going to grow any wheat AT ALL! With the cost of fuel alone no farmer will be able to afford to combine their crops let alone afford the high cost of inputs. In farming circles there is talk already of not planting wheat – nobody is prepared to take such a risk so unless Government starts to think sensibly for once, agriculture and food security will continue to slide further and further. Everyone is sick and tired of a Government that thinks the people must toil and toil and toil, take all the risk and then get paid peanuts in ‘funny-munny’ while the fat-cats do nothing but rake in huge profits. There are sound and proven principles to economics and Government thinking they can change these age old tenets to suit themselves spells disaster! A famine is coming without doubt.