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The tobacco sales season opened on Wednesday and, despite the El Nino season and resulting drought, it looks as though the deliveries and sales will be reasonable, if not record breaking, and certainly above the 265 million kg of 2021.
There had been hopes before one of the worst El Ninos became active, that a 300 million kg record-breaking crop would be achieved. That is not possible in such a bad year, but the farmers and tobacco industry have put in a lot of effort to minimise the losses.
Part of the effort was the irrigation available to larger producers and many medium farmers who managed to plant an early crop and then keep it going through the dry spells.
The small producers, easily the largest group of farmers and the mainstay of the industry, also managed to keep their major cash crop alive.
Most of these farmers have very small tobacco plots, so it is possible to harvest water when rain does fall and even to carry water in extremes. But one important point that will need to be kept in mind by the industry is how losses and reduced harvests are to be funded.
Almost all tobacco is now grown under contract, whereby the tobacco merchants put up the cost of inputs and then deduct these costs when the crop is delivered, before paying the remainder to the farmers.
While outputs are down, the original costs are still there and need to be paid for. So a formula could be derived so the loss or reduction can be shared by contractor and farmer.
The small auctioned crop is probably hardly affected by drought. The farmers who can afford self-financing almost certainly have adequate irrigation on their farms.
So while their inputs will be a little higher, from extra power and water charges, their profits will hardly be affected.
Another reason for the modest level of damage is the fact that tobacco is both moderately drought -resistant in that it can cope with some stress, and is grown across the centre of natural region two, basically the best farming region outside the specialist areas of the Eastern Highlands. So even in a bad year this tobacco belt is not a disaster, just a reduced harvest.
Tobacco has been pushed as a mainstay of rural development across the tobacco area, as the quickest way of rapidly increasing incomes and assets of tens of thousands of farming families.
The success has largely been due to the major co-operation of the merchants and farmers, along with some highly-welcome innovation.
As with all functioning systems there is need for proper supervision and arbitration and the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board has been a mainstay in ensuring all farmers and all merchants are licenced, that all contracts and other deals are adequate and fair, and that everyone in the system from the smallest farmer to the largest merchant obeys the rules in letter and spirit.
As a result, the system works exceptionally well and, while farmers always want a higher price and merchants always want a better leaf even with near perfection, everyone does rather well out of the industry, and it is the main non-mining export, although no longer the top export. Metals have grown fast.
Production levels are now above those of the last year before land reform, even in a bad drought year, and tobacco beat the grain groups in proving that land reform would increase production as well as make both use of land and the spread of farming profit far more equitable.
But we also need to boost value beyond the farmers and the merchants who do the initial processing before export of raw leaf.
Opening the season, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga once again brought up the need for the manufacturing sector to be adding value as well.
At present 98 percent of the crop is exported as raw leaf, and manufactured exports are only around one percent, about the same as what Zimbabweans smoke.
It is difficult to break into manufactured export markets, because the tobacco industry is so tightly controlled both by almost every country and by the major brand manufacturers who prefer to have a factory in every country and ship in the leaf.
The African Continental Free Trade Area will make exporting possible, but we must be able to create demand.
It should be possible to create and market particular Zimbabwean brands, although this might well need collaboration between industrialists, merchants and farmers so that a wider range of tobaccos is grown to add to the high quality lighter Virginia leaf that makes up almost all of the Zimbabwean crop.
Many top cigarette brands and rolling tobaccos have a percentage of the sun-dried Oriental tobaccos to add flavour, and many pipe tobaccos have these as well as fire-cured leaf varieties.
There was production of these types some decades ago, but demand seems to have fallen and now we actually import pipe tobacco and rolling tobacco, rather than export it.
We have built a great reputation as a producer of quality Virginia leaf, both for that flavour and for filler tobaccos, but as we continue to push out and start building factories we need to be ready to grab every opportunity, and those opportunities should add value to the farmers and merchants as well as the industrialists and marketing efforts.
Online Reporter