Obert Chifamba

Agri-Insight

THIS past week I chanced a meeting with Manicaland’s provincial Agritex horticulture expert, Mr Douglas Nzarayebani, at his office in the city of Mutare.

Our discussion zeroed in on the performance of the horticulture sector in the province.

What came out of the interaction made me realise that the majority of farmers — not just under the horticulture bracket — but across many other farming categories were their own worst enemies, particularly when it comes to operating viably as business people.

Essentially, most of the farmers have since mastered the art of production and  are doing very well, but the icing on the cake — marketing — has been the missing ingredient to their usually successful seasons.

It seems the bulk of the farmers have become so accustomed to selling their produce to consumers within their localities that they are not comfortable with venturing out into more lucrative markets.

In most cases their highly perishable horticultural produce ends up spoiled by the roadside or in the fields after failing to find buyers.

Mr Nzarayebani said a survey they had conducted with some farmers’ representatives revealed that big supermarkets and some processing industries in and around Mutare were in fact in dire need of most of the farmers’ produce are but were failing to access them.

This means that farmers are not doing aggressive market scouting as they end up with mounds of spoilt produce since they do not have the capacity to add value, store and sell later.

The other observation that came out of our discussion was that many farmers were producing crops just for the sake of it and did not have specific markets in mind, which is akin to shooting randomly in the dark in the vain hope of hitting a target.

This reluctance to break out of the usual marketing cycle and secure new markets has over the years given birth to the unscrupulous middlemen who fleece farmers out of their produce, leaving them with peanuts after their toil.

Middlemen find a very fertile hunting ground in the farming communities every year because the farmers are afraid to take the bull by its horns and look for markets and negotiate deals.

The long and short of it is that farmers need to visit local big supermarkets and find out how they can do business together and also establish the quantities and quality of produce they need.

After that, they can even form groups and jointly supply the required commodities in the event that they would have successfully brokered deals requiring huge quantities that an individual cannot supply.

Of course a single farmer, especially the smallholders, cannot produce enough to meet the requirements of big markets hence the need to do it jointly.

The other advantage of doing it as a group is that they will have bargaining power and move from just being price-takers, as they are currently doing for most crops, and start fixing prices that factor in their costs of production.

As price-takers farmers are being deprived of the chance to demand prices that reflect the true value of their produce, leaving them unable to break even or recoup what they would have invested in the production process.

This is unfortunately pushing many of them out of competitive farming and in the end they produce just enough for their immediate needs and fail to grow in terms of business.

Farming has in recent years become serious business that requires the farmers to operate the way all other businesses do, which makes planning very critical to curtail losses resulting from failure to recoup capital invested during production.

This is in many ways counterproductive to Government’s plans to industrialise rural areas as envisaged in Vision 2030 that is pushing for the attainment of an upper middle income economy by 2030.

There are, however, some smallholder farmers who have since seen the light and have moved out their comfort zones and started doing aggressive marketing and value-addition from their farms.

One such farmer is Mr Bright Nezomba of Honde Valley who is in the process of setting up facilities to process bananas into other products before selling them.

Mr Nezomba is producing banana flour, cosmetic oil and dried bananas just to name a few that he is supplying to supermarkets in the province and beyond, but is struggling to make an impact because of the inadequate quantities he is delivering.

He also has to contend with funding constraints and the absence of basic infrastructure in the form of well-equipped dryers, electricity and roads.

Most roads are in a bad state, which has seen transporters shunning to do business with farmers while those that eventually do will charge exorbitant fares that leave the farmer with very little earnings.

The majority are even pushed into debts that will force them to sell other belongings for a song just to settle the debts, leaving them poorer.

It will not take rocket science to realise that there are abundant markets for horticultural produce out there — locally and even internationally — but there are just no linkages connecting the parties.

Farmers are just producing without specific markets in sight so they end up stuck with their produce after harvesting.

But the bottom line here is that farmers can easily avoid such unhappy endings if they plan their activities properly and work as teams even when they purchase inputs.

Most input suppliers are comfortable delivering purchases made in bulk, which reduces the strain on individual farmers.