(NEWZIMBABWE) Tobacco: the tentative steps towards recovery
COMMENT - Where do these rhodies get off? Do they ever learn at all?Tobacco: the tentative steps towards recovery
22/09/2011 00:00:00
by Andrew England and Tony Hawkins
AS Fidelis Gweshe walks between red brick farm buildings to show off his tobacco seedlings he chuckles at his circumstances. “I’m a banker by profession and farmer by accident,” he says.
Down the road, a neighbour, Manasa Matongo, sits on a log where he cultivated a hectare of tobacco for the first time last year and quietly outlines his plans for expansion. Between them, they represent the new faces of Zimbabwe’s black farming community.
A decade after Robert Mugabe, president, implemented his controversial and often violent land reform programme, both farmers are living off seized white-owned land.
Under Zimbabwe’s land redistribution system Gweshe, a former banker, farms around 230 hectares and is an “A2” category, generally considered a politically connected individual granted a large share of a seized property. Matongo, a former truck driver, with six hectares is a category “A1” – the smallholder.
The land seizures, which began in 2000 and continue today, helped trigger Zimbabwe’s international isolation and the collapse of one of Africa’s most developed economies, destroying the agriculture sector.
[Actually hyperinflation because economic sanctions did that. And yet, the land reform program survived the destruction of the national currency. I would say it has proven it's robustness. Now go bother someone else. In Australia, for instance. - MrK]
Yet in the past 18 months, there has been a tentative recovery, particularly in tobacco, as black farmers have begun to grow a cash crop that was once the preserve of white commercial farmers.
Tobacco production collapsed to a low of 48.8m kg in 2008, down from almost five times that in 2000. At the start of 2009 it began to recover and production more than doubled to 123m kg in 2010. This year, it is forecast to be about 131m kg.
This has come as the number of white commercial farmers has plummeted from 4,500 to between 200 and 250, while the number of black smallholders producing tobacco has gone from a few hundred to more than 60,000.
[Are they slowly admitting that they were lying about Zimbabwe for 10 years, by slipping in the truth bit by bit? The writers are actually admitting that the elite capture theory of Zimbabwe's land reform program is a lie. That land was not taken from 6,000 white farmers and given to 5,000 'friends and cronies of Mugabe', but to over 350,000 families? What is this, journalism by stealth? Just tell the truth, just for once! Wow. - MrK]
Tobacco production was the main driver behind a 34 per cent growth in the agricultural sector last year.
The recovery is partly due to the relative political and economic stability after the opposition MDC joined Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in a coalition government in 2009.
The main force driving the change has been the extension of contract farming by tobacco companies and buyers, which have provided training and inputs for black farmers as they seek to boost output of the Zimbabwean leaf.
Matongo, 66, says he was only able to grow tobacco after he received support from a tobacco company to build two barns used to cure the leaf. “If I get a third barn, I could grow at least three hectares,” he says. “I cannot just keep on begging for assistance [from the tobacco companies].”
For his part, Gweshe, who lives in the farmhouse from which the former white owners were evicted, has increased his production from 15 to 20 hectares two years ago to 50 hectares with improved yields after the help of inputs from a tobacco company. With the proper resources, he says, he could double production again.
Experts caution that it is too early to gauge the sustainability of the recovery in sectors like tobacco, while other areas of agriculture, including wheat, coffee and flowers remain in dire straits, with negligible levels of production compared to 10 years ago.
“People are jumping the gun to say [tobacco] is a success. I would say it’s a success when we have reached former levels of production and surpassed them,” says Deon Theron, president of the Commercial Farmers Union, which represents white commercial farmers. The union estimates the land reform programme has cost $12bn in lost production.
In tobacco, two distinct areas of activity have emerged. There are 200 or so mostly white large-scale commercial growers running sophisticated operations that produce a higher quality leaf.
Alongside that group, is the smallholder sector operating at lower costs but also lower productivity rates. As their number has grown their share of the crop has increased to around 65 to 70 per cent, but yields have halved, industry officials say.
“In the short term, quality has taken bit of a dip but it will recover through training,” says an industry expert. “There’s a culture [of growing tobacco], the knowledge is there, it’s just question of getting the right inputs to the right people at the right time.”
Paul Zakariya, executive director of the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, which predominantly represents black smallholders, says the reforms have brought change for the "better and worse”.
A significant number of black farmers given land are failing to produce adequate crops because of lack of training, access to resources, access to good markets and support from institutions, he says.
Some white farmers have returned and are either leasing land from black farmers or working as managers. But Zakariya says Zimbabwe needs to draw more on the expertise of white farmers.
[Yeah, right. - MrK]
"We are not where we need to be at all,” he says. “It’s the politics we need to take out of production and let the business people do their thing.”
[Neoliberalism is on the way out. Get used to it. Those 'business people' received their land because of politics like everyone else. - MrK]
Labels: TOBACCO
posted by MrK @ 11:54 PM
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