Call to use plastic money

through serious liquidity challenges raising fears of some merchants failing to raise the cash to pay farmers.
“This makes it necessary for farmers to consider the use of plastic money through accounts that can be used in any part of the country and not necessarily buy their ware from the floors or in Harare alone.
“Under our arrangement with banks over 400 shops will be equipped with point of sale machines to enable farmers to do their shopping without hassles and without moving with huge sums of money on them,” said Mr Zakariya.
The shops will give the farmers discounts of between two and 10 percent for every purchase while the ATM card use will double as a membership card for the ZFU.
Kingdom Bank has already committed itself to the programme, while others are expected to confirm their participation by the end of this week.
He challenged farmers to exercise financial discipline and avoid impulse buying, which in the past saw some of them losing money to con-artists in exchange for very poor quality goods or something that was not even there.
The city council, he said, had also made the farmers’ situation more difficult by allowing people to open markets at the floors, which exposed farmers to unscrupulous traders. “This has often set the stage for the exploitation of the farmers by the profiteering vendors who buy things from town and later sell at very high prices at the floors. They take advantage of most farmers’ reluctance to look around before deciding what to purchase,” he added.