When agriculture sector sneezes ……
Financial Gazette 6/2/2020
Mandivamba Rukuni
IT IS now self-evident that the 2019-2020 agricultural season is a seriously challenging one. With the .significant rains coming in quite late towards the end of January, at least some livestock will be saved. Farmers have learnt and accepted climate change.
A significant number of farmers planted or re-planted in January as if it was the beginning of the season. But the yields will be quite low. We started experiencing maize meal shortages end of 2019.
We now have to rely on commercial imports as well as food relief well into 2021, hoping that the next one -2020/21 will be a normal season! All this reminds me of the adage — “When agriculture sneezes, the rest of the economy catches a cold”. With climate change and protracted economic impediments, it is turning out to be more of— “When agriculture catches a cold — the rest of the economy slides into pneumonia!”
Although I will talk about the wider implications of the current agricultural season in this article, I will devote several future articles to interrogating the past, present and future of Zimbabwe’s agriculture sector.
Agriculture will continue to be the back-bone of this economy for a very long time to come, beyond upper-middle income status. Today though, an estimated 5 million rural inhabitants will be needing food aid.
Meanwhile, the urban poor are recognised as increasingly food insecure. We expect the Food and Nutrition Council to release urban household food security figures in due course. At least 60 000 tonnes per month of maize grain imports is required in order to avert famine.
When I look back at the last four decades, I do realise that agriculture has lost its autonomous status. Way back then, all we needed was a good rainy season, and rural households would automatically be well-fed with meaningful disposable incomes. The rural economy was fairly independent of the urban economy. Today, rural people are poorer and can go hungry even in good rainy seasons!
The urban economy increasingly dictates what happens with the rural economy. Moreover, with increasing imports, worsened by our rather porous borders, our markets are distorted in favour unfairly cheaper imports, and farming is less and less attractive as a business.
Challenges with the current season can therefore be largely traced back to the problems with the wider economy. The “Zesa yainda” (power outages) phenomenon, for instance, and low water tables and dam levels is limiting the potential impact of irrigation.
Then we have another example of Foot and Mouth Disease which has become such a nightmare for herders. The veterinary department has had to restrict cattle movement, even to areas where grazing is better. Supplementary feeding of beef on the other hand means that cattle are competing with humans for grain — especially maize and soya. Food shortage leads to stock-feed shortage. The poultry industry is equally affected, opening the market to illegal imports.
When it comes to exports, especially for major industrial crops such as cotton and tobacco, Zimbabwean producers are now “price-takers” whereas historically, we were “price-givers”.
Zimbabwe has de-industrialised. We continue to de-link agriculture from domestic manufacturing. World prices for industrial commodities are therefore, determined by manufacturing nations who import our raw materials at increasingly give-away prices.
The more we push farming, without pushing for direct links with domestic manufacturing, the more we sweat into poverty. So we still hear of challenges with “side marketing” by cotton and other farmers dodging contract prices, which in turn are driven down by international markets.
This also generally explains why farmers are calling for payment in forex. What happens in factories in faraway industrialised countries now directly affects a small family farmer in Gokwe and Chikombedzi!
Our industrial crops are under economic attack and that includes tobacco, cotton, sugar cane and few other plantation crops. Tobacco has been easily our main forex earner. Moreover it is the one alongside cotton that now offers smallholder farmers a footprint in agro-industry value chains.
Both tobacco and cotton have experienced a downward slide in international prices with tobacco prices sliding down as much as 30 percent in the last season. There are also a few new promising industrial crops such as macadamia, hemp and medicinal cannabis.
The sad part is that even with promising long-term investments such as macadamia, global warming is already playing havoc with this fabulous cash crop. Increasing temperatures are sliding down yield potential of macadamia, a crop that has attracted quite a few investors in Chipinge, Chimanimani and Honde Valley, with the promise of lucrative export earnings.
The 2019/20 season is therefore a reminder of why the entire agenda for Zimbabwe’s economic recovery relies on agriculture.
So I will continue to update further on the current season in my next articles.
Meanwhile, I would like to close this installation with a little bit of insight into why I will devote space in future articles to weaving in and out the tapestry of Zimbabwe’s agriculture, past, present and future.
I would like to put to rest a number of myths about Zimbabwe’s agriculture. I know as Zimbabweans we are fatally attracted to the past. We still talk about going back to being the “bread-basket” of the region!
Almost every country in the region can produce grain surplus nowadays. So it is more visionary, in my opinion, to aspire to be the region’s “supermarket”, by tightly linking all our primary farm production to manufacturing for both domestic and regional markets. Some of our domestic brands were a massive hit in the region and beyond. We can re-invent this across all value-chains.
I will also proffer my “theory of change” as to how agriculture and rural development policy can link to massive growth in the rural middle classes and therefore to sustainable economic structural transformation.
We have to shift significantly away from the current unorthodox structural transformation of accelerating urban populations without urban manufacturing and service jobs.
I will also address in future the fallacy of superiority between large and small farms.
We have to get agriculture to play its historic role in broad-based economic and social transformation:
- Contributing food security and feeding a growing urban industrial population;
- Supplying raw materials to the manufacturing sector;
- Building domestic capital through savings and investment;
- Providing an effective market for industrial products;
- Earning forex and improving balance of payments; and
- Releasing excess labour from agriculture into the growing industrial sector.
I will also touch on re-building key value chains into competitive ones.
The land issue is one of my favourite issues and I will devote time to it in future articles. Perrance Shiri, Lands, Agriculture, Water and Rural Resettlement minister addressing participants at the ministry’s strategy session recently in Bulawayo, zeroed in on how the structure of the agrarian sector has changed due to land reform.
He would like to promulgate policies that attract investment in agriculture. I would, therefore, like to also offer my views and insights on the land issue.
We now have to turn down the still rather loud emotional noise on the land issue and turn up smart and strategic thinking and planning.
Rukuni is Director of Barefoot Education for Afrika Trust (BEAT). He was chairman, Commission of Inquiry into Land Tenure Systems of Zimbabwe, 1993 -1994 and is a former dean of Agriculture at the University of Zimbabwe. He writes here in his personal capacity.