Harare- Sorghum deliveries have reached 31,951 tonnes between 1 April and 24 July 2026, up 15% on the 27,804 tonnes marketed a year earlier, on Agricultural Marketing Authority data. It is the slowest riser of the season’s three gaining crops, behind maize at 106% and soya at 58%, and it is the one whose strategic value is rising fastest.

Small grains, meaning sorghum, pearl millet and finger millet, are the crops built to yield when the rains fail, and the rains are forecast to fail.

Every major forecasting centre now puts a strong El Niño over the 2026/27 season, and El Niño means drought for southern Africa. Small grains are drought-tolerant by design, requiring less water than maize and surviving the shortened, erratic rainfall that a warming climate is bringing to Zimbabwe. Cabinet’s own climate guidance urges farmers toward Pfumvudza and Intwasa conservation methods and small grains matched to their agro-ecological zones, precisely because these crops carry the drought risk that maize cannot. A 15% rise in a good maize year is a modest number attached to the crop the coming season most needs.

The price is not the reason the number is modest. GMB pays US$364.75 a tonne for traditional grains, the identical floor it pays for maize, so small grains carry no price penalty at the state buyer. The 2025/26 producer-price structure deliberately puts maize and traditional grains on the same footing, removing the historic disadvantage that low and variable prices imposed on sorghum growers. With the price neutralised, the constraint on small grains sits on the demand side, in what the market and the consumer actually want.

That demand constraint is cultural before it is commercial. Zimbabwean consumers overwhelmingly prefer maize as the staple, and there is a persistent perception, especially among younger and urban eaters, that sorghum and millet are foods associated with poverty and the rural areas. Researchers describe the shift toward traditional grains as more a matter of demand than supply, since the production can be grown and the market to absorb it as food stays thin. A slow move among health-conscious urban middle-class buyers is under way, and it is gradual. The crop that agronomy favours is the crop the dinner table resists.

The industrial buyers are what give small grains a floor of real demand. Delta Corporation brews Chibuku, the market-leading traditional African beer, from locally grown maize and sorghum, and that opaque-beer business is a large and consistent sorghum buyer. The stockfeed sector takes sorghum as a feed grain, and the two together anchor demand that does not depend on the household staple market shifting. Delta’s sorghum offtake in particular links a listed consumer counter directly to the small-grains crop, so the volume marketed is tied to opaque-beer demand as much as to food policy.

The export dimension is the underused opportunity. ZimTrade has urged producers to add value to sorghum, millet, rapoko and pearl millet as global demand for gluten-free and health foods rises, positioning traditional grains as an export earner in place of a domestic fallback. This reframes the crop entirely, from a poverty-associated staple into a premium export category, and it is the outlet that could pull marketed volumes up faster than the domestic table will. The sector has barely begun to capture it, which is both the gap and the potential.

The promotion effort behind the crop is substantial and slow to convert. Government input distribution, extension promotion, price parity with maize, medical and nutrition advocacy, and the First Lady’s own campaign have all pushed small grains, and traditional-grain hectarage has climbed past 322,000 hectares. The marketed volume rising only 15% shows the distance between planting the crop and selling it into a market that still clears maize first. Production support has done its part. The demand pull, industrial and export, is what has to grow to match it.

Therefore, the speak on small grains is a strategically vital crop advancing too slowly for the moment it faces. The 15% rise is real, the price disadvantage is gone, and the hectarage is up, and none of that has so far produced the demand surge that a drought-exposed country should want to see in its most drought-tolerant grain. The industrial buyers give it a floor, the export market gives it a ceiling worth reaching for, and the domestic staple market remains the stubborn middle. Ahead of an El Niño season, the crop that can best withstand the drought is the one whose marketing most needs to accelerate, and 15% is not that acceleration.

In the next 30 to 90 days the key variables to watch are small-grain deliveries against the maize marketing rate (a drought-exposed season should lift the most drought-tolerant crop faster than 15%), Delta’s Chibuku sorghum offtake (the largest single industrial demand line and the clearest link to marketed volume), any expansion of gluten-free traditional-grain exports through ZimTrade channels (the outlet with the most headroom), and the 2026/27 planting intentions for small grains against maize (the real test of whether the drought forecast is shifting the crop mix toward the hardier grains).

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