admin | April 11, 2024
News Brief
A series of extreme weather events over the past few years, including heavy rainfall and severe droughts, has led to a significant increase in rodent populations in Zimbabwe, threatening the country's food security. In Chisumbanje, a village in the southeast, residents have started hunting these rodents out of necessity, using them as a source of food and income. This has helped to manage the pest, which was causing substantial crop losses.
Remeredzai Mashakwari reaches into a bucket and pulls out a small, dark-gray rodent. With a sharp stick, she opens the tiny animal’s stomach and guts it. When she’s done with the remaining 400 rodents, she boils them and removes their fur. Not far from her, other women and children process more than 1,500 rodents.
Ms. Mashakwari starts frying. The pleasant aroma of sizzling, seasoned meat replaces that of raw blood and guts. Known as mbeva in the Shona language, the small rodent, which resembles a mouse, is a delicacy, says Florence Chijumana, one of the women. “It tastes better than any meat.”
That is especially true when grain harvests are plentiful, and people hunt mbeva for leisure, she told Global Press Journal in 2021, when farmers were hunting it for survival.
Drought in southeast Zimbabwe, where the village of Chisumbanje is located, lasted from late 2018 to early 2020, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center. Rainfall spiked dramatically in mid-2021, reaching a 10-year record high in October.
The rainfall led to an increase in the rodent population, which devastated crops, creating food shortages. On top of this, lockdowns and closures of international borders during the coronavirus pandemic hindered the transportation of food.
Shingirayi Nyamutukwa heads the Plant Protection Research Institute, an arm of the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Resettlement. He says rodent outbreaks are common in agriculture, attacking a variety of crops in all stages of food production and storage.
There are nearly 400 species of rodents in Africa, but only 5% are crop pests, according to a 2017 study in Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing, a British agricultural science journal. Two species — the multimammate rat and the grass rat — are most responsible for population outbreaks in sub-Saharan Africa. Although they are small in size, they cause so much damage because they are prolific breeders. The young reach sexual maturity after 90 days, and females can conceive again as early as 24 hours after giving birth.
In countries like Zimbabwe, outbreaks can have serious impacts on food and economic security.
“If rodents are not controlled properly, they can cause 100% crop loss, not only in the fields, but also in storage,” says Mr. Nyamutukwa.
The food crisis left farmers with no alternative but to hunt rodents. Farmers went out to ravaged maize fields for up to three nights at a time, setting traps with buckets of water to drown the rodents. They returned home with hundreds of them, which could fetch around $50. They fed some to their families and sold the rest.
For a season spanning November to April, Ms. Mashakwari says she leased a hectare of farmland (about 2.5 acres) for $67. Without rodents, she would have harvested 5 tons of maize and earned about $1,500.
“This is all we have for now,” she says, pointing at a frying pan of sizzling creatures. “It’s better than no food at all. But when there are none left to catch, we’ll have to find something else to survive on.”
This story is adapted from an article written by Linda Mujuru, published by Global Press Journal, and titled: “‘Rains Finally Come, And So Do the Rodents.” To read the full story, go to: https://globalpressjournal.com/africa/zimbabwe/rains-finally-come-rodents/