Because of El Niño, the rainfall is expected to be lower than normal in the latter part of the season.
Planting a short season hybrid will require irrigation and technology to bring the crop to harvest. It will also require the immediate availability of hybrid seed stock.
The squatters have been busily destroying the drip irrigation lines and converting their confiscated lands to slash-and-burn, scratch, beast-draughted, subsistence agriculture much more suitable to the rich black alluvial soil that the autochtones have traditionally farmed rather than the red soil dry land veldt that the Europeans have been farming.
The farm invaders have also taken over the seed farms and put them out of production.
As to using genetically modified maize, Zimbabwe is at the forefront of southern Africa's opposition to using it even as famine relief.
Politicians should never believe their own propaganda, much less make technological decisions on its basis. Here the party line was that the Whites had stolen all the best land, and it was time for The PeePull to set things right. First, the bulk of the evictees are black, not white, second, it is the farming technique rather than the land itself that was responsible for the high rate of food production, and third, the people attempting subsistence farming on that land find that their net production is less than subsistence level. No surplus in sight, in fact, a net deficit.
The ground assumptions were very Marxist in nature - that the workers did the work and the bourgeoisie reaped the benefits in terms of profits. And, of course, that the workers were pretty much interchangeable. So productive, experienced farmers were replaced by political followers, and the nominal ownership of the farms given to more political followers, and they're wondering why the only surplus here is hot air.
I suspect the hope here is threefold: first, that the ones to do the dying early on will be Mugabe's political opponents, second, that somehow Mugabe's followers won't starve right along with them, and third, that the world will step in to save the situation once the objectionable are dead. Plan B involves a Swiss bank account and asylum in South America. It's a much, much smaller plan.