After a decade of media criticism Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Program became the subject of positivist articles from 2011 onwards, almost all of them focussed on how Zimbabwe’s new farmers are driving an extraordinary recovery of the tobacco sector. Sean Christie followed Zimbabwe’s 2013 tobacco season and found the data backing the claims of recovery could do with closer scrutiny.
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“You know, you South Africans are very late in reporting the story of tobacco’s recovery,” says James Mutambanesango, MD of the Tobacco Sales Floors in Harare.
It’s true. When tobacco production in Zimbabwe swelled to 123million kilograms in 2010 from an all time production low of 48million kilograms in 2008, South Africa’s media ignored the swell, whereas IOL reported that tobacco was tentatively recovering, driven by resettled small-scale farmers. That story was followed by near identical narratives from the Financial Times, the BBC and the New York Times, among many.
In 2013 tobacco production continues to rise, as so do the psalms devoted to it, most notably Joe Hanlon, Teresa Smart and Jeanette Manjengwa’s recently published academic study Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land, which presents tobacco’s revival as evidence that land reform in Zimbabwe is working.
This is a great burden for a single sector to carry, however, and it seems the weight of responsibility may be leading to the distortion of certain facts.
For example, the 2013 tobacco crop was projected to come in at 170million kilograms. When I conducted interviews with the likes of Mutambanesango in June, as well as Dr. Andrew Matibiri, the CEO of the Tobacco Industry Marketing Board (TIMB), this was still the figure they were using, in spite of the fact that the sales season was drawing to a close. As of July 5th, following the close of the auction season, Zimbabwe’s total tobacco production stood at 159 315 580 kilograms. This is still an impressive 10% leap from 2012’s total, so the continued adherence to the 170 million kilogram figure is a little baffling.
Another misleading figure is that which represents the number of tobacco growers in Zimbabwe. At the IMARA Investing in Africa conference in early June Matibiri reported that there were 91’000 growing units in Zimbabwe, up from a little over 70’000 in 2012. However, the number of growing units in 2013 was not 91’000—that’s the number of people who have registered as growers with the TIMB. Only 75’000 farmers delivered tobacco this year, according to the TIMB’s figures, and according to Commercial Farmer’s Union president Charles Taffs (and a host of tobacco industry personnel who do not want to be quoted) even this number is misleading, because it conceals the rampant practice of side-marketing, which, explains Taffs, “is when non-farming friends and family members of farmers register independently as growers in order for the farmer to be able to access better prices than those offered by his contractor.”
Still, there’s no denying that the growth in grower numbers has been phenomenal—from 52’000 farmers who delivered in 2012 to over 75’000 in 2013.So again, why the deliberate obfuscation?
The fact of the matter is that farmer numbers matter in Zimbabwe, where they are the primary justification for a land reform that replaced approximately 4000 white farmers with approximately 175’000 black farmers.
Matibiri’s utterances over the years have emphasized this conversion.
“We’re looking at a crop of 170 million kilos this year, which will bring the country about US$630million, which will be shared between 91’000 growers as opposed to roughly 6500 growing units back in 2000, 1700 of which were owned by white large scale farmers,” he says.
Comments like these counter a point that local economists like John Robertson have made, to the effect that, had tobacco production not been interrupted by land reform, Zimbabwe would, like world number one producer Brazil, be taking much fuller advantage of the fact that the international price for flue cured leaf is about four times higher than it was in 2000.
“We’d have made approximately US1,2 billion in 2013, compared to the slightly less than US$600million that we did earn,” Robertson estimates.
But if tens of thousands more people are sharing in the earnings than was previously the case the point is a moot one, or so say several researchers, industry players and government officials.
Gesturing beyond his office window at the thriving marketplace that has sprung up outside the TSF, Mutambanesango says that at the peak of the selling season, “thousands of small scale farmers were leaving here for their homes in the rural areas with trucks loaded with household goods.”
“Tobacco is enabling them to send their children to better schools,” he says, echoing lines that will be familiar to readers of the June 20th, 2012 New York Times article, which reported that Zimbabwe’s small scale farmers had earned “on average $6,000 each, a vast sum to most Zimbabweans”.
US$6000 would indeed represent a fortune for a small-scale Zimbabwean farmer, but on visits to resettled farms near the prominent tobacco growing areas of Beatrice, Marondera and Mt. Darwin over a period of three weeks, I did not meet a single A1 grower who had earned anything close to this.
“My A1 farmers grow an average of 2 hectares each per season at a cost of between US$1500 – US$2000 per hectare, and at an average yield of 800 kilograms per hectare,” says Barabara Mugabe, the government agricultural extension officer (Agritex) for 17 formerly white-owned farms near Beatrice.
At the season’s average price for A1 farmers, which was US$3.57 per kilogram, Mugabe’s small scale farmers are likely to make no more than US$2600, equating to between US$7 –US$8 per day per farmer family.
“If our quality was better we could make more,” says Godfrey Mpenenzi who worked as a security guard in Harare prior to being allocated a 6ha plot on Kinforth Farm near Beatrice in 2002.
“Some of the farmers here achieved a price of US$5 per kilogram, but most of us were below US$3 a kilogram and some are getting as low as $1.20,” he says.
Mpenenzi, who made more or less the same from tobacco in 2013 as he did as a security guard in 2000, says tobacco farming is a better livelihood “because everything we make, we make as a family. My wife and children are all involved in the planting and curing, and we all share the profits.”
Merlvern Marowa, who spent more time unemployed than employed before being allocated a plot on Chester Farm in Beatrice District, says quality is being impacted by a number of factors.
“Our contractors give us access to inputs and machinery too late in the season. Also, the electricity supply to the farm was shut off after land reform, and so farmers here are wood-curing their tobacco in a barn not designed for this purpose. This affects the quality of our product,” he says.
Around 50% of the 72 A1 farmers on Kinforth and Chester farms are farming under contract to one or other of Zimbabwe’s 12 tobacco merchants. The practice of extending inputs and technical advice to small scale farmers in return for their crop originated in 2004 in response to the land reform-induced collapse of agricultural finance. In 2013 65% of the 160million kilogram crop was grown under contract.
The practice has on the one hand enabled Zimbabwe’s tobacco recovery, but on the other it has tied farmers into an expensive form of farming, because the mark up put on inputs varies between 20 – 30 percent, according to industry sources.
“We need the banks to start lending to farmers again, so that we can control our own farming,” says Mpenenzi.
Zimbabwe’s new farmers aren’t in a position to complain too loudly, however. Given free land in the early 2000s, new farmers whose crops failed in 2013 are currently being given a free ride by the merchants. This is according to the head of a prominent tobacco buying company, who did not want to be named for fear of political reprisal.
“Very recently all the tobacco companies received a letter from Saviour Kasukuwere (Zimbabwe’s minister of Youth Development, Indigenization and Empowerment) warning us not to pressurize the new farmers who have been unable to pay back their loans or inputs. We’ll toe the line, because the profit margins are there, but what this political edict represents in effect is an implicit subsidy to the new tobacco farmers of between US$10 – 15 million,” the source said, adding that the political lifeline would only end up hurting farmers in the medium term, as the tobacco companies would ignore defaulters in the future, “forcing them to sell leaf probably grown with insufficient inputs on the auction floor, where they will receive lower prices.”
Zimbabwe’s merchants, for their own part, are as practiced in the arts of obfuscation as anyone else, especially in respect of sustainability issues. For example, the massive growth in the number of tobacco farmers, as a result of land reform, has become the major contributor to a deforestation rate estimated at between 330’000 – 370’000ha by the country’s Forestry Commission. This is a big problem for the merchants, who have to be able to demonstrate that their product is farmed sustainability. They have embarked upon a program of founding eucalyptus woodlots to meet the needs of small scale farmers. However, eucalyptus takes 7-8 years to mature, whereas a report recently completed by the industry’s Sustainable Afforestation Program shows that total deforestation will occur in the country’s major tobacco growing areas by 2016. They haven’t publicized this astounding misalignment between strategy and reality at all. (Maybe put the Landbouweekblad link in here).
In light of revelations like these Zimbabwe’s small scale farmers, who Matibiri says comprise 83 % of the total number of farmers in Zimbabwe but which produce only 43% of the crop, are not necessarily tobacco’s salvation but possibly its greatest liability.