NOT everyone would have been happy about the success of Government’s Command Agriculture programme. But even those who initiated the programme had no idea of the amount of rainfall, so couldn’t have predicted how much it would yield at the end of the harvest.
Now the wolves are on the prowl. As we reported in this paper yesterday, there are “middlemen” who have seen opportunities from Command Agriculture and are not ashamed to reap where they did not sow.
These opportunistic “entrepreneurs” are scouring the farming areas offering to purchase maize for as little as $140 per tonne. Government is offering $390, but that’s for maize delivered at Grain Marketing Board depots.
The difference is that the said middlemen are exploiting a number of factors from the unexpectedly high yield. They have resources to buy maize for immediate cash. They didn’t invest in the growing of the crop so they can very easily spend. The tragedy is that they don’t even compete with what Government is offering.
What these buyers are capitalising on are farmers’ desperate situation. Many of them are short of cash to pay for school fees and similar family contingencies and so will readily surrender their grain to anybody who appears to come to the rescue — hence farmers are being ripped off by people who often are too happy to celebrate the failure of every Zanu-PF programme. This has happened over the years.
We have seen it throughout the course of the land reform programme; those with cash rushing to buy inputs offered by Government such as seed and fuel from struggling farmers in need of food.
We have also seen it with those who provide transport to tobacco farmers ending the season far richer than those who broke the clod and harvested the crop. Particlarly, maize farmers face transport challenges to ferry their produce to Grain Marketing Board depots. Where this is available, because of the charges, they risk huge losses at the end of the trip. This is where these opportunists come in offering to save the farmers the transport costs.
There are even claims that the same middlemen are buying maize for big firms who use maize in many finished products. Alternatively, the middlemen reportedly take the maize they buy cheaply from desperate farmers for resale to the GMB, and get the recommended Government price.
This is nothing short of economic sabotage because it is the taxpayers who foot the bill.
Government might also need to move fast to deploy undercover investigators to find out where these middlemen are getting the cash when the rest of the population is starved. We can only guess that the nefarious activities have been in gestation for a long time.
There are people, or even syndicates, which are hoarding money to further their scams. They must be investigated and punished hard.
Then there are the politically-inclined who have been praying for the failure of Command Agriculture. One way to undermine its success is to buy some of the maize and then GMB figures will show that the tonnage forecast by Government was too high. We have had in the past instances of maize being illicitly exported by private dealers who rip off farmers in desperate times such as this.
For their part, farmers must be warned strongly of the consequences of their actions. Government set a target of how much they should pay back for the inputs they got. The seed, fertiliser and tillage services were not for free under the Command Agriculture programme. Those who benefited must know that they will have to pay back a certain tonnage, then they dispose as they please of the excess.