The Minister of Lands, Agriculture, Water and Rural Resettlement, Perrance Shiri has announced that Treasury budgeted $20 million to further finance a heifer scheme under Command Agriculture.
He said the remarks while delivering a lecture on the Progress and Challenges of the Command Agriculture initiative to the Joint Command Staff Course No. 33 at Zimbabwe Staff College.
He observed that the programme which started as a maize input scheme in the 2016-17 cropping season to boost food production following two consecutive seasons of high food imports will this year focus on livestock.
He added that the Command Livestock programme had succeeded in distributing 3 539 heifers to 908 farmers in eight rural provinces.
The development comes when there are still no answers as to what happened to the US$3 billion which the government disbursed for the programme between 2017 and 2018.
Allegations say that businessman Kuda Tagwirei’s Sakunda Holdings which has strong links to the ruling ZANU PF misused the money.
The remarks are said when the country has a huge shortage of mealie-meal, an issue that has forced the country to import maize from neighbouring African countries including South Africa and Tanzania.