ZFU executive director, Paul Zakariya

Kenneth Matimaire

MUTARE — Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector is expected to experience another gloomy season owing to lack of adequate funding as it is receiving a mere US$200 million of the US$1,8 billion required in finance, the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU) has said.
ZFU executive director, Paul Zakariya told the Financial Gazette’s Companies & Markets on the sidelines of a meeting of farmers recently that the country was ill-prepared for the forthcoming agricultural season.
Zakariya cited a depressed market, low competitive capacity, the inadequacy of inputs and unavailability of financial resources as the major problems affecting agricultural preparedness and production.
“The interest is there, the will is there but the resources to fulfil the wishes and the will are very limited. Funding for agriculture is not at the levels that are expected.
“We need about US$1,8 billion to finance a normal agricultural season in Zimbabwe. But at the moment we are hovering at about US$100 million to US$200 million,” Zakariya said.
He revealed that inputs that had been mobilised for the 2015/16 farming season could only support a small fraction of the sector at a time no single agricultural product was generating profit.
It should be noted that the country’s agricultural sector took a nosedive following the chaotic land reform programme that displaced close to 4 000 white commercial farmers starting in 2000.
Zimbabwe — an agro-based economy — lost its bread basket status as most of the resettled and inexperienced farmers failed to fully utilise their new properties, resulting in a collapse of the agricultural sector and consequently the manufacturing sectors.
Since then, government has been making frantic efforts to resuscitate the agricultural sector.
Zacharia said considering the current economic climate and state of industries, the country was better off importing than producing its own products because of the high costs of production locally.
Local products that had been affected by the high production costs domestically include fertilisers, he said.
“But we applaud all these initiatives of trying to reduce the high production costs. More has to be done though,” he said.
Zacharia said that the reason why Zimbabwe was importing grain was because it made economic sense to buyers.
Quizzed whether the US$98 million agricultural envelope from Brazil and other funding packages from the European Union were enough to breathe life back into the sector, Zacharia categorically stated that Zimbabwe’s farming sector needed a total package to be successfully resuscitated.
Brazil recently gave Zimbabwe a facility under which farming implements were distributed to various parts of the country under a loan arrangement.
“In financing agriculture we need a total package. These funds are falling far too short in terms of the financing of recovery of agriculture in Zimbabwe. Recovery of agriculture speaks to the issues to do with infrastructure development. You need roads, we need our railroads to be upgraded, we need to makes sure that our marketing institutions themselves have been recapacitated. GMB, for example, should be able to buy grain from the farmers so in short we need a total package for agriculture,” he said.
Zachariah said the ZFU was advocating a total funding package to resuscitate agriculture, which he said remained the backbone of the country’s economy.
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