Maravi

(STICKY) (NEWZIMBABWE) Biti: Cabinet ministers among failed farmers

COMMENT - Finance Minister Tendai Biti (MDC) is holding the payment of farmers for goods delivered to the Grain Marketing Board hostage to his political demand for a 'land audit'. Sound familiar? Typical 'TEA party' tactics. In the process, he is putting next year's harvest in jeopardy.

Biti: Cabinet ministers among failed farmers
29/10/2011 00:00:00
by Staff Reporter

FINANCE Minister Tendai Biti has defended his agriculture funding record insisting criticism of his policies was only coming from failed farmers, among them ministers in the country’s coalition government.

Bit has come under fire from cabinet colleagues accusing him of undermining the country’s land reforms by “refusing” to adequately fund the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) and help farmers procure inputs. Defence Minister, Emmerson Mnangagwa recently said the GMB was failing to pay farmers for grain supplies after being refused funding by Biti.

“We are worried that farmers struggle to get agricultural inputs due to lack of funds when they are owed huge sums of money by the GMB,” Mnangagwa told farmers at a meeting in Chiredzi.

“We put the blame squarely on Finance Minister Biti of the MDC-T who does not release funds to the GMB on time,” he said.

But Biti dismissed the criticism claiming more than US$2 billion dollars has been put into agriculture since the formation of the coalition government in 2009.

“The people who criticise our work at the ministry, especially what we have done for the agricultural sector, do so from the viewpoint of malice and total ignorance,” Biti said in an interview with The Herald.

“This is so particularly with failed farmers, some of whom masquerade as Cabinet ministers who continue to be called new farmers even after 11 years of the land reform programme.”

He said agriculture accounted for up to 40 percent of total government expenditure since 2009 adding the sector had only started recovering after the formation of the coalition government.

“In 2008, we could not find a bag of maize meal … wheat production was zero and coffee and tea plantations had become sites of tourism. But in a very short period, agricultural output has massively grown because of the interventions of the inclusive Government,” he said.

Biti claimed some of his critics were actually responsible for the collapse of agriculture in the last decade adding they were further holding back recovery of the sector by blocking a much-needed land audit.

“Unfortunately, the non-genuine farmer in powerful political positions is afraid of the (land) audit, which will expose that they are multiple farm owners.

“It will further expose the vicious malpractices taking place on the land. There is land that is not being productively used and that is what the audit will expose.”

Biti said the government did not have the resources to fully fund agriculture and warned that a full turn-around in the sector would not be achieved unless farmers were given “securitised long land leases”.

“There is no Government in the world that can ever finance agriculture in full. To expect the Government of the day, particularly the present GNU, to be able to finance agriculture is fiction,” he said.

“We can talk about financing agriculture until the cows come home but as long as the farmers do not have securitised long land leases, then let us forget about agriculture beyond subsistence farming.

“As long as the land does not have title, it is dead capital, it has no useful and exchange value. More importantly, without security of tenure, farmers cannot borrow money from the banks to finance their operations.”



COMMENTS

Mafira_Kureva Moderator 14 minutes ago

This is what happens when people don't report properly. This report has failed to properly articulate the purpose of the GMB and because of that Biti sounds clever. The issue with the GMB is that it is supposed to support the farming of our staple food stuffs rain or shine. It is not the purpose of the GMB to make a profit only... but for the maize farmers to have a ready market regardless of the demand for maize in that year. This helps with food security otherwise all farmers will rationally produce tobacco or cotton because they fetch more on the market than maize. Besides it is the law of the land that all maize crops should be sold directly to the GMB for the purpose of food security.

Now this minister is chasing his own party's agenda of squeezing maize producers and making the land reform look stupid so that ZANU PF can no longer use it to get votes. Now Biti claims that he has supported the land reform better than Gono and company which cannot be true by all means and then goes on to say that the land reform started doing better only after the GNU ...pppuuleeeeaaasse... Biti is a lawyer and therefore should be listened to with caution, all lawyers want to do is win the arguement regardless of the fact that they may lose the cause in the process. It is for good cause that the GMB should continue to be funded and the fact that employees of this company are corrupt has never been government policy and therefore should be addressed through the proper channels where evidence exists and not for the minister to withold funding to a strategic institution.. unless if my earlier assertion runs true that the misinister is puting party strategy of making Zimbabweans suffer first... but what do I know...

Labels: AGRICULTURE, GRAIN MARKETING BOARD ZIMBABWE, MDC, NEOCOLONIALISM, SABOTAGE, TENDAI BITI

posted by MrK @ 4:29 PM