Online Reporter
AS Zimbabwean tobacco farmers continue breaking production records most years and produce an ever larger crop, the need for secure markets coupled with an ever wider range of varieties becomes paramount.
Almost all the tobacco produced each year in the world is bought by someone to make cigarettes, although a modest fraction goes on cigars, pipe tobaccos and more recent times for the modern version of the wet pipes that have been so popular in parts of the Middle East for so many centuries.
But, crucially, there is no global market where someone buys tobacco and piles it up in warehouses for multi-year storage or speculation, and not much in the way of a spot market, where surplus tobacco from one source can just be dumped to see if anyone will buy it.
This need of Zimbabwean farmers for solid customers wanting long-term assured supplies of specified varieties and grades usually gives the best prices available and plays to Zimbabwean strengths of being able, through a fairly sophisticated merchant system, to supply some very precise requirements.
So when the world’s largest tobacco company, Phillip Morris International, starts making definite and positive moves to re-establish its presence in Zimbabwe, having apparently been testing the waters recently through some quiet purchases using a trusted local merchant, we need to ensure that we can make the most of this.
The initiation of more formal contacts started at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, where the top leadership of Phillip Morris met the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Professor Amon Murwira, who has been pushing Zimbabwe’s willingness to expand trade relations with everyone, a key policy brought in by President Mnangagwa at the start of the Second Republic.
The ties between companies like Phillip Morris and Zimbabwe should be able to move far beyond just buying tobacco and start some serious input into the varieties that farmers grow and moving on towards investment into processing and production of tobacco products.
At present, Zimbabwe is a major producer of the lighter grades of Virginia flue-cured tobacco, which forms the bulk of the crop. This is all very well, especially when you are looking for a good-quality specific type of tobacco that can be blended easily with other, often stronger flavoured tobaccos, grown elsewhere.
With its range of brands, Phillip Morris is a large market for this flue-cured Virginia, but in addition, it buys large quantities of other types, including darker flue-cured tobaccos, air-cured tobaccos and Oriental-type high flavour tobaccos. Each brand is a careful blend, usually of several types of tobacco and rarely from just one country.
Phillip Morris, like all other major buyers, will be looking for good quality tobacco grown by the farmers, with local processing and value addition largely comprising tight grading, leaf processing for moisture and removal of stalk. A step that has now started sees production of cut rag, that finely cut tobacco that can be placed in the blending hoppers and cigarette machines of the buyer.
If Zimbabwe wants to move further with value addition, then our farmers and major buyers need to work together to produce the additional varieties needed for modern blends, which at the more valuable levels might be built on a base of flue-cured Virginia but which will include reasonable fractions of other varieties and types.
Already an enthusiast in Matabeleland South has reintroduced sun dried, smaller leaf, oriental tobaccos with their particular favours, and volumes can be scaled up. Other enthusiasts have been growing the special thin tobacco leaf types needed for modern water pipes.
This just shows that Zimbabwean farmers are capable of extending the range of their production, and are not locked into the types that a couple of thousand plantation owners once produced since they were not really interested in what sort of value could be added.
If Phillip Morris moves into using Zimbabwe as a production base, then it is unlikely to be very interested in importing the additional types, meaning that local farmers will need to learn how to grow them, and grow them at a sufficiently high quality that they can be added to blends.
This is where our best modern farmers could shine, considering how they built up the production side of the tobacco sector over the last couple of decades and in the latest years have been breaking all production records and using the known tendency of smaller farmers to be able to concentrate on high quality as well as better quantities.
Value addition means that a range of policies are needed to have the right types of tobacco as well as the capital equipment to process these and blend them before the actual cigarettes are made.
