The Sunday Mail
Whilst Ruvimbo, an imaginary smuggler, is making her maths as to how she can take her bales of second-hand clothing into the country from Mozambique, and how much she is likely to make as profit from the sale of such, the headache is slightly different for Chenai, an imaginary cotton farmer.
Every morning when she wakes up, Chenai looks at the sky to check for the early tell-tale signs of rain, wondering how promising the coming rain season would be. At times, she even smells the rain in the air.
But the coming of the rain is not her concern. Her concern is if the 25kg pack of seed that she got when she delivered her cotton seed the last time will be enough.
This is September and she has not yet bought the accompanying inputs for her forthcoming cotton season.
She needs the fertilisers, the chemicals and labour to help her weed her cotton, pick the cotton and pack it into bales.
She weighs her options, should she try tobacco or maize? But even before the death of her husband ages ago, that was the crop they used to do, and she remembers quite well how the crop used to pay them.
In fact, they owe their herd of cattle, their children’s education and the few other items lying in their yard, like the scotchcart, to the time when cotton was the envy of many crops.
For long considered the “white gold”, cotton has, in the past decade, somehow lost its lustre. Whereas it used to compete with tobacco and maize as a crop of choice, the same cannot be said of the crop today.
And whilst Ruvimbo might not even know the existence of Chenai, her calculations as she buys her second-hand clothes bales in Beira has an effect on Chenai.
The flooding of second-hand clothes in the country, albeit in the presence of a ban, has seen cotton taking a battering, a battering which might take time to repair.
Whilst the Government has to be commended for the cotton inputs scheme that it launched last year, where farmers were given free inputs, this initiative will come to naught if there is no holistic approach.
A few minutes with the calculator will show that the Government might be shoving money down a drain. Besides assuming the Cotton Company’s US$68 million debt, the Government has gone on to fund a hugely ambitious free cotton input scheme, which will see about 400 000 smallholder farmers receive a hectare’s supply of inputs over four years.
And unless the receiving end of the cotton production line is revived, the Government might end up sitting on a huge stockpile of cotton, which it might be forced to export, in its raw form. Thus at a loss.
The textile industry, incorporating from weavers and spinners to clothes manufacturers, need to be resuscitated. If David Whitehead, Kadoma Weaver and Spinners, Julie Whyte, among many players in the cotton value addition chain are allowed to come back into the system, in a way Chenai’s headache will be solved.
The revival of the cotton-spinning industry will mean that cotton will have a ready market, with an accompanying attractive price.
But it is not as simple as that. It is a Catch-22 situation for the Government: a complete ban on second-hand clothes has repercussions as a number of families are living off the sale of the same.
Whilst the importation of second-hand clothes has been banned, reason why many are having to resort to smuggling, the sale of such is happening openly in all parts of the country. Mupedzanhamo, the popular Mbare market, has for long been known for second-hand clothes.
Over the years, similar second-hand outlets have sprouted all the country and some cities, especially the bigger ones, convert some of their streets into open flea markets over weekends – and the products sold mostly there are second-hand clothes.
Whilst many figures have been thrown around, from 45 percent utilisation capacity to the different millions needed to retool largely antiquated factories, questions remain as to whether a revitalised clothes sector will be able to compete with the dollar-items offered through second-hand clothes bales.
Questions also arise as to how sustainable will be Government input support programme, offering free inputs and offering improved cotton producer prices on one hand and having to aggregate that with an ineffective, rather, collapsed cloth-making sector on the other.
For a complete ban on second-hand clothes to be effective, the consumer will need options and with the sector literally on its knees, a ban just for the sake of banning will be ineffective.
Notwithstanding the political ramifications of such a ban.
