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The pledge by President Mnangagwa when he launched this season’s Pfumvudza inputs programme for smallholder farmers that the Government was committed to development, particularly in the rural areas that had long been marginalised, is already being carried out.
The fact that he chose Gokwe for the launch ceremony, an area that for various historical reasons, including being the locality where those moved off land given to colonial farmers where dumped, is among the most marginalised. So the President was choosing well the site where he was launching this year’s Pfumvudza.
Pfumvudza itself is obviously a major plank of the rural development, empowering the small-scale farmers and rapidly converting them from subsistence farmers to farmers who can grow a lot of their food themselves but are primarily businesspeople growing an increasing amount of produce for sale. Development requires that a lot of people, in fact most people except children, the infirm and the very old, are earning their living and preferably earning it by being productive, working in a business or working as business people themselves. This is the only way to generate real wealth, by producing things directly or indirectly that other people want to buy.
The major Government programme was the other half, and the practical half, of land reform. Giving people access to land is all very well, but unless they could use that land it was not a significant advance. The inputs programme does give those who had land, or who managed to obtain land rights under land reform, the start they need to push forward.
There has been criticism of Pfumvudza in that it is largely Government grant, with suggestions that the whole thing could be commercialised by making allocations of land bankable. This would be legally impossible for communal land farmers and is too early for the A1 resettlement farmers; they need to be built up and be solid producers before the benefits outweigh the risks. So the Government is building them up.
It is also clear that the scheme needs some fine tuning by the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development. Almost all the actual and potential corruption in the area where the ministry has direct control, down to the GMB depots, seems to now be working fine.
But at the actual final distribution point, in some communities, the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission has reports of favouritism and corruption. It should be easy to close that loophole quickly, even if it means a ministry officer has to be responsible for the final handing over of a bag of seed and a bag of fertiliser to each farmer. Unforeseen problems do arise, but so long as they are promptly solved and not allowed to fester they will not derail progress.
It is important that this is done because Pfumvudza is the main driver of rural growth. As almost all farming families start earning money, then a lot of other development will automatically follow.
The Government will obviously have to be involved, but more and more of the involvement will be in providing or facilitating infrastructure, and making sure that things like local government planning is done properly.
The Government is looking at getting mechanisation into the small-scale sector, concentrating, as seems reasonable, on how farmers can access a pool of equipment for the few days they might need it rather than owning it themselves and letting it lie idle for most of the year. There is the programme, a long-term programme by any standard, of adding more and more irrigation each year.
That ties in with the creation of industry and other businesses in rural areas. These, obviously again, will be using the raw materials from the area. Many will come from the private sector although some might need to be seeded by the Government.
But as small towns grow and new ones are established the siting and planning need to be done properly. It might sound daft to have a master plan for some small town of 500 people, but when it has grown to more than 10 000 people everyone will be a lot happier if the plans for water supply and sewage processing and recreation were done properly at the beginning. Some towns will grow quite big, but in general it is better to have a lot more smaller towns, to take just one example, 20 small towns or large villages in Makoni District rather than see Rusape assume city status with 250 000 people.
The planning, and provision of infrastructure, will be needed by investors and industrialists. If someone is going to build a factory they will want a power and water supply, some way of disposing of waste, somewhere where staff can live or where houses can be built, other businesses who can sell the groceries this staff will need to buy, and education and health facilities. The supermarket and the pharmacy might be private but most of the rest is public sector, from central or local government.
The President is aware of all of this, but being practical he also knows that the whole edifice of rural development will be built on what the farmers produce, and what they earn from that production.
That is why the major effort at the start must be on transforming and enabling the farmers, so there is a foundation that can see the almost rest automatically slotting into space. And as development moves forward the normal practice would be private sector using government infrastructure.
There are many areas of the world where the rural economies are built on small-scale farm production, but with very high levels of production and a lot of other business riding on the back of that production from the mechanics who fix the tractors right up to the local factories producing luxury regional foods. Zimbabwe can follow that route easily, and we are starting at the correct point, enabling the farmers.
Online Reporter