Way forward for new farmers: An open letter to Zanu-PF Secretary for lands, Dr Ignatius Chombo

07 Sep, 2014 - 06:09 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

I am a proud and grateful beneficiary of Government’s Land Reform Programme.

I was allocated an A2 farm after I applied in response to an advertisement flighted in the Press at the time by the Lands Ministry.

Unfortunately, I was given a piece of virgin land, which was both under-utilised and undeveloped. There was no infrastructure whatsoever, save for some fence most of whose wires and poles had been stolen. I later learnt that the previous owner of this property had two other much bigger farms elsewhere, where he seemed to have been carrying out most of his farming activities, if at all.

It is now reliably estimated that less than one third of prime agricultural land was being fully utilised before land reforms in Zimbabwe.

To some extent, taking a cue from this scenario and guided by their own situation in South Africa, there is also a discussion policy paper on the table in South Africa, with a proposal to cut farm sizes by half.

The first half being utilised will be left in the hands of current owners and the other half presumably under-utilised parcelled out to workers on the farm for their occupation and use.

The workers’ plot sizes will be proportional to their length of service on that particular farm.

I literally had to start from scratch on my allocated plot, with my very first structure being a wooden cabin I bought in Harare for use by my new workforce. The piece of land had limited arable portions, and I had to hire District Development Fund bulldozers and other equipment to clear the forests and bushes so as to increase arable space.

Being an accountant by profession, not a farmer, I had no option but to learn farming business quickly.

I think I did.

After about nine years of farming and the introduction of the multi-currency regime, I felt confident and competent enough to want to share my farming experiences with others, in the national interest.

I achieved this in the main by religiously submitting written papers (Aide Memoires) to some of the relevant and key delegates attending Zanu-PF Annual Conferences with the view and hope that such submissions would have some bearing on the party’s polices and pronunciations on agrarian reforms.

Zanu-PF is the only political party I have ever understood and believed in since I became politically conscious and knowledgeable. And from all indications and intentions, I appear destined to follow and respect it for the rest of my life. I have no apologies to make in this regard, to anyone both within and without Zimbabwe, for this is my basic and fundamental democratic right, which is also constitutional.

In my initial submissions to the party conferences, I highlighted some of the challenges which new farmers like myself encountered.

In summary, these were:

Inadequate Government subsidies;

Lack of finance;

Low producer prices;

High cost of utilities (such as electricity and water), shortage and unreliability of same;

Unsatisfactory levels of farm mechanisation (I have had to rely on hiring tractors since);

Climatic changes and conditions; and

Viability challenges emanating from some of the above factors, among other causes.

I did indicate in my initial submissions from the very beginning that the world over, where agriculture had been successful, this had almost without exception been on the back of Government subsidies to the sector. These subsidies take various shapes and sizes, and I cited specific subsidies in the United States, Europe and even colonial Rhodesia and pre and post-apartheid South Africa.

Under finance, I highlighted that particularly after dollarisation in 2009, there was dearth of liquidity in banks and other financial institutions. In cases where such limited funds were available in these financial institutions, these entities insisted on collateral security in the form of title deeds to properties, which very few new farmers had.

Those few farmers fortunate enough to assess these funds had to contend with exorbitant interest rates and bank charges, which almost rendered commercial farming unviable.

The last hurdle which such farmers had to overcome was that of climatic changes and conditions, which made it mission impossible for those without the necessary irrigation facilities.

In my last submission to the party’s annual conference in Chinhoyi, I suggested a way forward to overcome some of these challenges, particularly that of finance.

I suggested State Guarantees on 99-year leases, offer letters and land permits.

I did indicate then that these Guarantees were permissible in terms of Part VI Section 61 (Powers to give Guarantees) of the Public Finance Management Act (Chapter 22:19). Incidentally, I was the Lead Consultant to Government in the compilation of this particular Act, among others.

Both the Bankers’ Association and the Ministry of Lands appear now to be slowly warming up to the concept, both in its direct and simple terms or through some intermediary entity called Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), or by whatever name it will be called. The full name and title of the SPV is the Zimbabwe Asset Management Corporation (Pvt) Ltd.

Some A1 farmers have also of late been granted formal land permits in place of offer letters, and more such are in the pipeline.

As new farmers, we suffered what later turned out to be a false threat to our tenure on the farms.

After national elections of 2008 and before the results were made public, quite a number of former farmers in our area came back and booked at nearby lodges. They appeared to be under the belief and conviction that the MDC had won the elections and were now to issue us with 10-day notices to vacate the farms.

Had this happened, not only would it have been a national disaster, but it was to be a personal catastrophe and unfair to some of us who had invested so much in infrastructure from our own resources.

Fortunately for me, I later learnt that the previous occupier of my farm was not among the returnees.

The success of the new tobacco farmers, of which I am one, is now a matter of public record with production levels of over 215 million kilogrammes in the just-ended marketing season, mainly from small-scale farmers. This is now very close to the maximum production of 230 million kilogrammes pre-2000 land reform record, achieved almost exclusively by white large-scale farmers.

What is not readily apparent to most though is the potential of these mainly small-scale tobacco farmers to double current production figures if given anything like Government support that the large-scale tobacco farmers enjoyed during their heydays.

Our small-scale farmers have this far only benefited in the main from assistance from our Chinese friends by way of their various contract schemes. The same Chinese provide the biggest market for their tobacco, which market is huge and we will be hard-pressed to ever satisfy.

The story of maize in particular and other food crops and livestock production in general, is also pregnant with potential if the correct and sufficient subsidies are granted, and right policies are followed.

The latest maize production figure of 1, 4 million tonnes from the just-ended summer cropping season, driven mainly by the Presidential Input Scheme and good climatic conditions, is indicative of what can be achieved on the back of appropriate subsidies. Even those with short memories will also recall that farmers in Malawi and Zambia achieved bumper maize harvests exceeding 2 million tonnes in one season, the result mainly of subsidised inputs where, for instance, that a 50kg bag of fertiliser went for between US$5 and US$10 compared to our US$30 to US$45.

The competence and capacity of our local farmers here can never be doubted given that they traditionally produced the bulk of our maize before the land reform, and that our communal farmers received international awards for their efforts in maize production in the mid to late 1980s.

I leave it to the ingenuity of imagination as to what these tobacco and maize production figures could have been now had we had the appropriate State subsidies in place, Government guarantees offered to any farmer with access to State land, and also not abandoned the wise, phased Farm Mechanisation Programme that was then initiated and spearheaded by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.

In fact, the latter was to stand condemned and discredited as ill-advised quasi fiscal operations during the tenure of the largely dysfunctional inclusive Government. Equally condemned and shamed as a waste of tax payers’ money and susceptible to abuse by suspected senior Zanu-PF officials in the main were the subsidised inputs and other useful schemes such as Operation Maguta, then run mainly by the Zimbabwe National Army.

Mundane and relatively petty issues, which do not add much value, such as land audit, which never took off though, multiple farm ownership, the issue of derelict or underutilised allocated farms and so-called cellphone farming, took centre-stage during this same period, much to the detriment of the nation.

The current president of the Bankers’ Association of Zimbabwe, who happens to be my brother-in-law, was recently quoted making the very correct observation that over US$3 billion was spent on food imports (maize and wheat) since 2009, and that this averages over US$500 million per year.

The other topical issue currently is that of the non-performing loan book of the total order of sum US$700 million, which is proving to be a huge burden to the national economy in general and the banking sector in particular. It is submitted that the portion of US$700 million relating to agriculture could have been a non-issue for banks and other financial institutions if Government Guarantees had been extended to farmers in the manner I originally recommended.

Both this portion and the US$3 billion could also have been better spent as agricultural subsidies to the same effect or better, among other numerous socio-economic benefits to our nation, notwithstanding that this was against the grain of the hypocritical, poor and often conflicting advice emanating mainly from the Bretton Wood Institutions on such matters, which we appear prone to abide by and follow without question or benefit of judicious scrutiny even when no significant financial benefits are forthcoming or can be obtained or expected from these institutions given the diabolic sanctions regime legislatively imposed by the US.

The so-called Staff Monitored Programme currently running is a waste of time and effort in addition to being ill-advised and not well-thought out, in my view. Efforts to re-engage the International Monetary Fund and World Bank like all others such other attempts made in this regard, in both the recent and relatively distant past, are likely to be futile, yielding no tangible, desirable and significant positive results, anytime soon.

These Bretton Woods Institutions expect the country to service and settle its debts to them, notwithstanding the fact that Western sanctions have severely compromised the nation’s capacity to service these very same debts. In addition, Zimbabwe should give priority to settling its huge domestic debts before attending to such foreign debts, if you ask me.

Our hope and salvation lie in the visionary Look East Policy, further co-operation with the whole Brics group, intra-Africa regional and continental cooperation and trade, and to a lesser extent, the now much-anticipated complete lifting of all sanctions and other restrictions by the European Union in November 2014, if it so happens.

Share This:

Survey


We value your opinion! Take a moment to complete our survey

This will close in 20 seconds