• Zimbabwe harvested 261,868 metric tonnes of sorghum in the 2025/26 season, with Matabeleland South leading at 44,310 tonnes
• Pearl millet production fell 21.3% and finger millet dropped 47.1%, pulling total small grains output down 38.5% to 390,272 tonnes
• Small grains remain essential for food security in Zimbabwe’s drier provinces where they outperform maize under low and erratic rainfall conditions

Harare- Zimbabwe has harvested 261,868 metric tonnes of sorghum across eight provinces in the 2025/26 season, with Matabeleland South recording the highest provincial output at 44,310 metric tonnes according to the 16^th latest post cabinet briefing’s Second Round of Crops, Livestock and Fisheries Assessment Report.

However, pearl millet production fell 21.3% year-on-year in the same season, and finger millet production fell 47.1%. Total traditional grain production of 390,272 metric tonnes was 38.5% below the prior season.

Three of Zimbabwe's four major small grain categories declined simultaneously in a season characterised by above-average national rainfall. The sorghum performance and the millet collapse in the same season are complementary evidence of a structural shift in Zimbabwe's smallholder farming system whose implications for food security in the country's driest and most vulnerable provinces are more consequential than any single-season harvest figure.

Why Small Grains Are Not Small

The term small grains is an agricultural classification, not a value judgement, but it has the rhetorical effect of diminishing the category in policy conversations dominated by maize. Sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, and rapoko are not small in their significance to Zimbabwe's food security system.

They are, in the provinces where they are predominantly grown, the primary food crops, the crops around which household food security is organised, seasonal labour is allocated, and nutritional outcomes are determined. In Matabeleland South, Matabeleland North, the Midlands, and Masvingo, the natural rainfall zones and soil types that prevail are categorically unsuitable for reliable maize production in most seasons.

The commercial maize that arrives in these provinces through the GMB and private traders is purchased food, requiring cash income, which requires either remittances, livestock sales, or wage employment. The sorghum and millet that smallholder families grow on their own fields is subsistence food, requiring no cash transaction, no supply chain, and no market price. The food security of the majority of the population in Zimbabwe's drier provinces is determined more by their small grain harvest than by the national maize production figure.

This matters because it means that the 2025/26 national maize surplus of approximately 141,857 metric tonnes above total consumption requirements does not translate automatically into food security for the communities in Matabeleland South, Matabeleland North, and Beitbridge district that Agriculture Minister Dr. Anxious Masuka explicitly identified as areas that will not meet their annual grain requirements from local production. A national maize surplus benefits food-insecure communities in the drier provinces only to the extent that the GMB's distribution infrastructure, transport financing, and purchase capacity mechanisms reach those communities with affordable grain on the right timeline.

In the 2023/24 drought, the formal distribution system's inability to supply those communities at affordable prices and in adequate quantities was the primary driver of the food insecurity that affected an estimated 6 million people. The 2025/26 surplus changes the supply conditions at the national level but does not automatically address the distribution challenge at the community level in the provinces where small grain production is the food security backbone.

Matabeleland South's 44,310 metric tonne sorghum harvest, and the 261,868 metric tonne national total, are genuinely positive developments that deserve recognition on their own terms before the complications of the millet data are introduced. Sorghum is among the most drought-tolerant grain crops available to smallholder farmers in the southern African context, with a capacity to produce meaningful yields at rainfall levels well below the minimum that maize requires for commercial grain production.

In Matabeleland South, where mean annual rainfall in most districts falls below 450 millimetres and where the coefficient of variation of that rainfall is among the highest in Zimbabwe, sorghum's drought tolerance is not an agronomic curiosity but a survival characteristic that directly determines whether farm families eat or go hungry in the months between harvest and the next planting season.

The 2025/26 sorghum performance reflects both the La Niña-enhanced rainfall that characterised the season and the specific agronomic investments in improved sorghum varieties that government programmes, including Pfumvudza/Intwasa and the Presidential Input Scheme, have been deploying in the drier provinces. Improved open-pollinated sorghum varieties with higher grain yield, better grain quality for human consumption, and improved resistance to the striga weed infestation that constrains sorghum yields across the Matabeleland production zones have been progressively introduced through the AGRITEX extension system and contract seed multiplication programmes. Their adoption, while not yet universal across the province's smallholder population, is detectable in the above-average sorghum performance relative to prior seasons at comparable rainfall levels.

The provincial distribution of the 261,868-tonne sorghum harvest reveals the geographic logic of small grain production in Zimbabwe more clearly than the aggregate figure alone. Matabeleland South's leadership at 44,310 metric tonnes reflects the province's combination of largest planted area in sorghum and the crop's comparative advantage in semi-arid conditions.

Masvingo province's contribution, while not separately quantified in the cabinet briefing, reflects the sorghum production zones of the Lowveld and the drier communal areas of the province's western districts. The Midlands contribution reflects the mixed farming systems of districts like Gokwe South, Mberengwa, and Zvishavane where sorghum supplements maize in the crop portfolio of smallholders managing the rainfall uncertainty of a transitional zone between the high-potential north and the semi-arid south.

Pearl millet, locally known as mhunga, fell 21.3% in production year-on-year in the 2025/26 season. Finger millet, locally known as rapoko, fell 47.1%. These are dramatic declines in two crops whose production is concentrated almost exclusively in the smallholder and communal farming communities of Zimbabwe's most food-insecure provinces, communities that do not have the access to commercial markets, formal credit, or agricultural support infrastructure that would allow them to substitute alternative food sources when their traditional crop production fails.

The causes of the millet declines in a season of nationally favourable rainfall are the analytical question that the headline harvest data does not answer but that the evidence supports addressing with specificity. Pearl millet is a crop whose planted area has been declining across Zimbabwe for two decades as agricultural policy has progressively emphasised maize production through the input support schemes that define Zimbabwe's smallholder support architecture.

The Presidential Input Scheme, Pfumvudza/Intwasa, and the contract farming programmes that have been the primary vehicles for agricultural recovery since 2017 have all been calibrated primarily around maize, with sorghum as a secondary focus. Pearl millet and finger millet have received systematically less policy attention, less certified seed distribution, less research and development investment, and less extension service engagement than maize and sorghum. The consequence is a progressive decline in the planted area of the millets as farmers rationally respond to the incentive structure that government support programmes create, planting more of the crops that benefit from subsidised inputs and assured market prices and less of the crops that do not.

Finger millet's 47.1% decline is particularly alarming because finger millet occupies a nutritional and cultural role in Zimbabwe's smallholder food system that neither maize nor sorghum can replicate.

Finger millet has the highest nutritional density of any of the four major grain crops produced in Zimbabwe, with a calcium content approximately ten times that of maize, high iron bioavailability, a glycaemic index significantly lower than both maize and sorghum, and a storage stability of two to three years in traditional storage structures that makes it the most important food security reserve crop available to communal farming families in the event of successive drought years.

It is the crop that communities in the Buhera, Gutu, and Bikita communal lands have relied on across generations as the dietary and income foundation for the period between maize crop failure and the following season's harvest. Its 47.1% decline in a favourable rainfall season suggests that the reduction in planted area is structural rather than weather-driven, and that the structural driver is the combination of declining policy support for the crop and the progressive demographic transition of the communal farming population toward older age profiles with reduced agricultural labour availability for the hand-weeding that finger millet production requires.

The Climate Argument for Small Grains Is About to Become Overwhelming

The Meteorological Services Department's April 2026 assessment placing El Niño probability for the 2026/27 season at 88% to 94% transforms the small grains policy question from an agricultural equity concern into an immediate food security emergency planning question. The 2023/24 El Niño reduced maize production to 635,000 metric tonnes against a national requirement of 2,200,000 metric tonnes. Sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet production in the same season, while also reduced by the drought, declined less severely than maize because their drought tolerance physiology provides genuine yield stability under moisture stress conditions that are lethal to maize in its critical growth stages.

The comparative drought tolerance advantage of small grains over maize is not a marginal agronomic difference. It is a categorical one.

Maize requires a minimum of 450 to 500 millimetres of well-distributed seasonal rainfall to achieve economic grain yields in Zimbabwe's soil and temperature conditions. Sorghum can achieve productive grain yields at 350 to 400 millimetres of seasonal rainfall with less stringent distribution requirements than maize. Pearl millet can produce meaningful grain yields at 250 to 350 millimetres in the sandy soils of Matabeleland where its deep rooting system accesses subsoil moisture that maize cannot reach. Finger millet, while less drought-tolerant than pearl millet, is significantly more so than maize and produces a storable crop that provides food security through the most extended lean seasons.

A farming community that plants 40% of its available land in small grains and 60% in maize enters an El Niño season with a far more secure food outlook than one that plants 90% in maize and 10% in small grains, because the drought tolerance of the small grain component provides a floor beneath which household food security cannot fall even in the event of near-total maize crop failure.

The World Bank's 2025 Zimbabwe Country Climate and Development Report documents that the frequency of droughts in Zimbabwe has risen from once in every ten growing seasons between 1902 and 1979 to once in every four growing seasons between 1980 and 2011, with a further acceleration documented since then. If the 2026/27 El Niño materialises, Zimbabwe will have experienced severe drought conditions in two of three consecutive growing seasons.

A farming system that responds to this increasing drought frequency by reducing small grain planted area in favour of maize, the most rainfall-sensitive major grain crop in the portfolio, is a farming system that is structurally moving in the wrong direction relative to the climate trajectory it faces. The 47.1% decline in finger millet production in the 2025/26 season, which is a favourable rainfall year, represents the policy and incentive-driven acceleration of exactly the wrong agricultural response to a climate reality that is moving decisively toward more frequent and more severe drought events.

What the 2026/27 El Niño Demands of Small Grain Policy

The preparation window of seven months before the 2026/27 planting season is the most important agricultural policy window for small grains that Zimbabwe has had, precisely because the probability of a drought season makes the drought tolerance of sorghum and millet the most valuable agricultural characteristic in the national portfolio. Three specific policy actions within that window would materially improve Zimbabwe's food security outcomes in the event of an El Niño season.

The first is the inclusion of sorghum, pearl millet, and finger millet seed in the Presidential Input Scheme allocation for the 2026/27 season, at a scale and geographic targeting that reflects the relative drought risk of different provinces rather than the historical allocation patterns that have favoured maize.

For Matabeleland South, Matabeleland North, Beitbridge district, and the drier communal areas of Masvingo and the Midlands, a Pfumvudza-calibrated input package built around drought-tolerant sorghum and pearl millet varieties rather than maize represents a significantly better expected-value investment of government resources in an El Niño year. The cost of the seed is comparable. The expected yield performance of drought-tolerant small grains relative to maize in the rainfall conditions that an El Niño season produces is incomparably better.

The second is the rehabilitation of the small grain seed multiplication and distribution system, which has deteriorated in parallel with the decline in planted area as the commercial seed companies that maintain certified small grain varieties have reduced investment in categories whose planted area is shrinking.

The Government Seed Multiplication Unit and its network of seed multiplication farms in the small grain production zones require recapitalisation that is modest in absolute terms but critical in its timing: seed varieties that have been improved for drought tolerance, striga resistance, and early maturity over years of research at the Department of Research and Specialist Services' Domboshawa and Matopos Research Stations need to reach farmers before the October planting window. Seed distributed in November as emergency response to a drought already underway serves no agronomic purpose.

The third is the investment in small grain value addition infrastructure that would make the commercial production of sorghum and millet a more economically attractive proposition for farmers who currently plant these crops purely for subsistence consumption.

Sorghum has a documented and growing market in the brewing industry, both for opaque beer production and for craft brewing applications that command a premium price. The formal beer market, led by Delta Corporation's traditional and mainstream beer platforms, is a significant and growing off-taker for sorghum at prices that reward quality and consistency.

Pearl millet has a documented application in weaning foods, nutritional supplements, and the fortified blended food products that the WFP, UNICEF, and domestic social protection programmes distribute to children under five and lactating mothers. Finger millet's unique nutritional profile makes it a premium ingredient in the growing functional food and sports nutrition markets that have emerged in Zimbabwe's urban consumer segment over the past decade.

Building the commercial value chain for small grains, connecting the smallholder production of Matabeleland South and the other small grain provinces to the formal processing and market channels that reward quality with premium prices, is the instrument that makes small grain production economically competitive with maize rather than merely climatically rational.

A farmer who earns a premium price for quality sorghum malt delivered to a Delta contract, or for finger millet flour delivered to a WFP nutritional programme contract, is a farmer who has an economic incentive to maintain and expand their small grain planted area that the subsistence logic of household food security alone does not provide. The economic incentive, in turn, is the instrument that stabilises the planted area of the millet crops whose 47.1% and 21.3% declines in the 2025/26 season represent the structural erosion of Zimbabwe's most important food security reserve in the face of a climate trajectory that is making that reserve more necessary rather than less.

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