Elita Chikwati, Harare Bureau
The Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) has pledged to work with Government to boost agricultural productivity to ensure the industry contributes significantly to national economic growth.

Speaking at a National Land Tenure and Policy Dialogue workshop in Harare on Friday, CFU director Mr Ben Gilpin admitted their more than 100 years organisation was a product of race-based policies that came with colonisation.

“The lingering result of those inequalities contributed to the rationale for the radical land reform we have gone through in recent years. The marginalisation of indigenous communities and preferential access to the land in more favourable agro-ecological zones by whites left a festering wound long after independence,” said Mr Gilpin.

“At the same time, we observe that the consequences of the fast-track land reform have been painful for our constituency and for our former farm employees and it has had a significant effect on the country in economic and social terms,” he said.

Mr Gilpin said the CFU was not against the land reform but that there was a need for Government to assist current farmers to maximise production.

“As a union, we are committed to a comprehensive recovery of Zimbabwe and will do our best to facilitate this. This does not however mean that we will or indeed feel the necessity to blindly endorse policy or practice in the agriculture sector where we see a better way,” he said.

He said agriculture was an important sector with a big impact on the performance of industry.

“Organised agriculture is key to that. I believe as farmer representatives, our principal responsibility is to deliver a solid and coherent voice for our constituency. A voice of strength and unity that can clearly articulate the needs of farmers if they are to succeed in being the drivers of national economic growth and development,” Mr Gilpin said.  “We are working on this and the recent formation of the Federation of Farmers’ Unions is testament to this, but we need to go much further. Looking back at our union’s (CFU) days of strength, we are reminded that it was built on the economic and financial stability of the large scale farming sector,” he said.

The new administration of President Emmerson Mnangagwa is in the process of issuing bankable 99-year leases to newly-resettled and the remaining former white commercial farmers. This is expected to attract investment into the sector because of increased security of tenure.

Since the launch of the fast-track land reform programme in 2000 the Government has been providing inputs such as seed and fertilisers under the Presidential Imputs Support scheme to help resettle farmers who are unable to get loans from banks due to collateral issues.

In the 2016/17 farming season the Government also launched the Command Agriculture programme worth millions of dollars to help farmers beat grain shortages. It led the first bumper harvest in many years.