Call for improved tobacco marketing

The union has cited this year’s tobacco marketing season as one of the biggest challenges facing local farmers.
In an interview, the executive director of the association, Mr Paul Zakariya, said marketing needed to be improved for the benefit of farmers.
“Farmers need to be educated on marketing also as they are the ones who produce the crop, hence they need to know how to market their product. They should get organised in order to make the crop marketing exercise easy,” he said.
He said there was also a great need of more tobacco auction floors as the three that were available were not enough for the 60 000 tobacco farmers countrywide.
“When there are a few auction floors, there are a lot of unfair practices and corruption as farmers will end up desperate to sell their crop resulting in tobacco going at a very low price.
“For example, last year there was only one functioning auction floor which resulted in a lot of congestion as farmers countrywide were coming to one place for different activities,” Mr Zakariya said.
He appealed to the government to seriously address the market issue by formulating good agricultural policies that would help uplift the livelihood of small-scale farmers.
“We must have agricul-tural policies that promote agriculture in the country to support the growth of that sector,” he said.
Mr Zakariya said the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) was coming up with a tobacco marketing scheme aimed at helping market farmers’ produce.
“Farmers are asked to register and become members so that it becomes easy when they want to sell their agricultural output,” he said.
Mr Zakariya said local buyers had continuously exploited the small-scale farmers.
He urged farmers not to sell their produce to exploitative buyers but to wait for the auction floors to open so that they sell their products competitively.
“Buyers need to be well managed because they have a tendency of treating farmers unfairly hence affecting the producer prices. What is crucial is for the producer to have a producer price that is profitable to them because this is business and there is a need for profit for the next farming season to be viable,” he said.
He said the issue of buyers agreeing on a certain price was totally unfair as it was working against the farmer.
“An auction has to be an auction and the highest bidder should take the items rather than agreeing on a certain price, it is really unacceptable,” Mr Zakariya said.
He revealed that the TIMB was in the process of licensing four more auction floors in a bid to address congestion problems as farmers come to register, others trying to book and others coming to sell their produce at the same time.
He also challenged the local authorities to do away with the stalls of flea markets that were situated at the auction floor gates as they were meant for awkward profiteering reasons.
“The city council should do something about the issue as it was affecting farmers’ cash flow as farmers can’t resist buying products that these markets will be selling.
“Imagine a person orders a plastic jug for 50 cents in town and then resells at $5 more because most farmers have no knowledge about this trend.”
He said farmers could be using this money to prepare for the next season and preventing the issue of shortage of inputs but they were lured by the flea markets to buy things they did not need.
“Vending at that place should be discouraged as farmers’ money is wasted on worthless items,” he said.