Zimbabwe’s Women Are Baking Bread. Environmentalists Are Not Happy.

Getrude Nare fanned the dying flames that spilled from the iron lid of her bread stove. Inside the small dome, loaves were baking on wire-mesh trays.

“I have to guard the fire in case the yeasty bread becomes blanketed by smoke,” said Nare, who works as a rural tour guide in Save Valley, the country’s wheat bowl.

Nare, 38, is part of a group of women who began organizing in 2018 to build artisanal brick-and-wood ovens that, they hope, can churn out millions of loaves yearly to fortify household diets. They use the ovens to bake sourdough bread, buns infused with sunflower seeds, and chimodho, a filling, starchy cornmeal bread that is usually eaten with jam or soup.

These community bread ovens are made of cement, bricks, and sometimes dried cow dung.

“We call them ‘smart ovens,’ because our dream is to outsmart established, commercial city bakeries someday,” said Maidei Moyo, 29, who works with Nare, in southeastern Zimbabwe. Moyo has two children and neither she nor her husband are currently employed.

Pastry and bread-making are not activities normally associated with rural women in Zimbabwe. They are costly endeavors, involving pricey pans, flour mixers, ingredients like yeast and colorants, and the electricity to run it all. Normally, the expensive undertaking is done by either commercial bakeries or in the urban homes of middle- and upper-middle class families headed by politicians, lawyers, gold dealers, pastors, and the like.

But in these past few drought-heavy years, there has been a nationwide maize and wheat shortage. Giant commercial bakers have been forced into bankruptcy — creating a chance for rural women to step in. Zimbabwe’s Women’s Affairs Ministry has even encouraged bread-making clubs to fill the gap. So far, 2,000 women across the country have heeded the call.

There is, however, one problem:

While the baking collaboratives may sound like a solid grassroots solution to rural hunger, environmentalists are not happy. And they overwhelmingly support commercial efforts over those of the poor and hungry, who are desperate to feed and provide for their families.

The environmental cost

Nearly 80 percent of Zimbabwe’s 15 million people live in rural areas, and nearly two-thirds of them depend on rain-fed agriculture to get by, according to USAID. A warming climate has brought increased stress on crops, dried up vital dams, and caused livestock to waste away for lack of water — increasing malnutrition, hunger, inflation, and poverty.

Household hunger in Zimbabwe used to be confined to rural districts, but in 2019, as the economy faltered, hunger took root in cities as well. According to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, 37 percent of the urban population suddenly also needed food aid. In December 2019, the UN Rapporteur on Food Rights said that Zimbabwe was on the verge of starvation, with 60 percent of the population considered “food insecure.”

Enter the rural women baking collectives — and the environmentalists who oppose them.

Producing nearly 2,500 loaves a day so far has required the mass clearing of forests full of zebrawoods, pines, and acacias for the wood-gobbling ovens. Ironically, this increases the hardship for many rural women, 70 percent of whom depend on forest wood for cooking or home construction, said Joanna Mamombe, a biochemist who is also a member of Parliament.

“The wood used to bake bread that will cure household hunger is part of the same forest women lean on for energy,” she said. “It’s a no-win circle.”

Alternatively, commercial bakeries use hydroelectricity to power electrical bread ovens. They have minimal impact on natural wood. Gift Mawache, an independent geographer in Mutare — the center of Zimbabwe’s forestry industry — and a former woodlands surveyor for the Zimbabwe Forestry Commission, called experimental firewood-fed ovens “a menace to the environment.”

“In districts where electricity cooking or baking decreases by 10 households, our mapping shows that100 trees per year are cut down on average,” Mawache said. “Also, firewood ovens are a significant driver of indoor and outdoor pollution, which is the same pollution that affects women the most.”

Moving forward

There are now 50 communal bread-baking clubs across the country, said Mabel Chinomona, the head of the Zimbabwean Senate.

In her collaborative, Nare works with 10 other women to mix flour in large plastic bowls. All day, the women funnel heaps of logs into the ovens and take turns pulling the trays from the ovens.

The ultimate goal of the countrywide clubs is to supply 2 million loaves across Zimbabwe in 2021, said Hilda Karimba, the community oven supervisor in the Save district, where five communal ovens are up and running.

“Our artisanal bread might be inferior to fancy commercial bread out there, but rural eaters are enjoying our bread for 50 cents a loaf, while city residents pay $1,” she said.

That admission of inferiority is offered in response to critics who have called rural women’s baking initiatives “Stone-Age bush bakeries” that lack hygiene, leading to illnesses like salmonella. There is, though, an alternative to both commercial bakeries and forest-depleting artisanal ovens, said Charlton Hwende, a member of Parliament.

“Starter bread ovens cost just $800 in China,” Hwende said. “The government can import and cancel wood and brick ovens or pay craftsmen to make modern ovens for low prices like $300.”

And, if in the end, the women are unable to continue their wood-oven initiative, Nare is unperturbed. As she beat eggs into a bowl of wet flour, she said: “If wood fire ovens run their course, we’ll switch to baking bread by solar energy. We are not retreating.”

(Photo by Nyasha Bhobo)