“Communal and A1 farmers have been benefitting from the Presidential Input Scheme but government is considering reviewing the modus operandi of this scheme”.

GOVERNMENT will this year stop dishing out free agricultural inputs to communal and A1 farmers, but will instead introduce a subsidy on agricultural inputs, a Cabinet minister revealed last week.
The free-for-all inputs given to peasants through the Presidential Inputs Scheme, although a noble idea, had created a dependency syndrome which had become a threat to the country’s economic well-being and food security.
Also, the scheme had been prone to abuse by political heavy weights and traditional leaders to gain cheap political mileage and patronage.
Government has given farmers everything for free from farming implements to inputs such as fuel, grain and fertiliser under different schemes.
Speaking at the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce Congress last week, Lands and Resettlement Minister Douglas Mombeshora announced that government was reviewing the Presidential Inputs Scheme.
“Communal and A1 farmers have been benefitting from the Presidential Input Scheme but government is considering reviewing the modus operandi of this scheme, where we are looking at introducing a subsidy so that all farmers can access inputs at a subsidised price rather than having a situation whereby some farmers get inputs for free and others pay for the full price,” Mombeshora said.
Countries like Japan, China and the United States subsidise farmers to cushion them against high input costs that have threatened Zimbabwe’s production.
But the populist policy of providing free inputs encouraged laziness and not productivity over the years as production in the maize and cotton sectors has declined.
To improve productivity, government is also working with the Bankers Association of Zimbabwe to ensure that the A1 permit and the 99 year lease become bankable.
“For the semi small scale farmers, we have come up with a tenure document that we would want to be bankable, that is the A1 permits that were launched in July 2014. We are currently engaging the Bankers Association of Zimbabwe, to see how our tenure document can be bankable so that farmers will be able to borrow using those tenure permits.
“We are also working on the A2 tenure document…. One of the issues is the transferability of the 99-year lease and we are reviewing that to make sure that the document can be used as collateral,” he said.
Agricultural land in Zimbabwe has become a untradable economic asset and cannot be used as collateral by farmers. Farmers have weak security of tenure and weak land rights. Financial institutions have argued that lending to the agricultural sector has become excessively constrained and risky as the sector is both uncompetitive and non-performing. Both local and foreign investors have either lost or are currently insecure in their investment.
Zimbabwe’s gross domestic product has shrunk to less than half the size it was in 1998 as the land reform programme has played a very substantial part in inducing the contraction because of reductions in commercial farm output. The non-servicing of debts and the erosion of property rights have kept investors away as international support in most areas other than food security has been minimal.