Minister Mombeshora

Dumisani Nsingo in Victoria Falls
THE government has mobilised $27 million towards payment of farmers starting next week for grain deliveries to the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), a Cabinet Minister said yesterday.

Lands and Rural Resettlement Minister Douglas Mombeshora acknowledged that GMB’s failure to pay farmers on time was a breach of trust that has an effect of crippling agricultural productivity.

“Let me start by mentioning those who’ve suffered by delivering to the GMB and were not paid. Yes! The government is to blame because you can’t take a farmer’s produce and then you don’t pay for it.

“But I think we’ve been assured that these farmers should be getting paid maybe by next week. We’ve been assured that about $27 million, which is owed to farmers would be raised and these farmers would be paid,” said Minister Mombeshora while speaking during the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce congress that ended here yesterday.

“We’re also looking at empowering GMB because it represents the market for government but we’ve not been happy with it because it’s like a bottomless pit where money is put in but doesn’t come out. I think the Minister of Agriculture (Joseph Made) is looking at that entity with a view that it can be empowered to operate effectively.”

The minister said the government was seized with finding alternative ways of financing the agriculture sector to ensure the land reform exercise yields results.

He said all beneficiaries of the land reform programme need government support in the form of subsidised inputs.

Minister Mombeshora said consultations with the Bankers’ Association of Zimbabwe were underway with the view of ensuring that farmers could use their land as collateral to access loans to finance their agricultural enterprises.

“For the small-scale farmers, we’ve come up with a tenure document, which we would want to be bankable and that’s the A1 Permit, which was launched last year in July.

“We’re currently engaged with BAZ to see how our tenure documents can be bankable so that our farmers can go to the bank and various financial institutions to be able to borrow with those tenure documents,” he said.