‘Increase sunflower production to reduce cooking oil imports’

GOVERNMENT has called for increased sunflower production across the country as a strategic import substitution measure aimed at reducing the over US$200 million spent annually on importing cooking oil.

Sunflower seeds are essential for producing edible oils and are recognised for their health benefits, ranking second only to olive oil. While Zimbabwe primarily extracts edible oils from soya beans and cotton seeds, current output levels have proven insufficient to meet the needs of local milling operations.

This initiative seeks to enhance local agricultural production and promote self-sufficiency in cooking oil supply.
According to statistics, the country is said to be importing between 55 000 and 65 000 tonnes of sunflower oil from South Africa, which is valued approximately between US$240 million to US$300 million.

In an interview on the sidelines of a recent field day in Majindane Village, Umguza District in Matabeleland North Province on Saturday, Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development Permanent Secretary, Professor Obert Jiri called for need to support farmers to increase the production of local sunflower.

“We emphasise on food security as well as oil seeds and livestock feed security. What we encourage our Pfumvudza/Intwasa programme farmers is to plant crops according to their agro-ecological regions as well as to do sunflower, cowpeas or African peas and the like,” he said.

“Mostly for sunflower, it is a crop that is supposed to give farmers self-sufficiency in terms of oil seeds. Every household uses cooking oil yet as a country we import over US$240 million worth of crude oil which is just basically crushed sunflower seed. If we can encourage and support our farmers to grow sunflower and crush it at local level this will cut the import bill in a big way.”

He said this could be done at household level using the small oil-expressing machines that can do one bucket of sunflower seeds and that will impact a lot in terms of the consumption of cooking oil at household level.

Prof Jiri said this could be done at household, township and community level where farmers come together, bring their sunflower and process it into cooking oil.

“Yes, the processes of expressing and final processing are known by the experts that do cooking oil but the basic process and value-addition that can be done at household and community level and that is what brings rural development and improves the livelihoods at household level,” he added.

The Permanent Secretary said sunflower has become a very important oil seed crop, due to its drought tolerant properties which enable it to be grown under varying soil and climatic conditions.

He said the development will also ensure that the country is able to make more stock feed from sunflower meal which is one of the major protein sources in livestock feed, especially dairy cattle, chickens and even pigs and rabbits, as it has a high protein, fibre and oil content.

Meanwhile, in a recent post on X (formerly Twitter), United Refineries Limited (URL) group chief executive officer (CEO), Mr Busisa Moyo who is also the Oil Expressers Association of Zimbabwe (OEAZ) president said last year Zimbabwean oil expressers crushed 150 000 metric tonnes of soya beans and of that only one third (1/3) was from local soya beans.

“Farmers often decide which to plant between maize and soya! There are switching costs, but few farmers are aware that the market for soya beans, including solvent extracted meal, full fat and medium fat are 500 000 metric tonnes. Largely because of asymmetric information and a closed group of farmers,” he said.

“We need to grow the cake (hectares planted) so that have more output of oilseeds and like Malawi commoditise, popularise the growing of soya bean through a combination of farmer education/training and appropriate correctly nuanced funding/ investment.”

He said cotton seed and sunflower were options in the oilseed mix but most plants currently installed in Zimbabwe can only process soya and cotton.
Mr Moyo said if the farm off-take from the farmers for sunflower was available, it would incentivise investment and installation of such processing plants.-chroncile