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The Grain Marketng Board, which saw its old monopoly vanish in 2009, with the effective abolition of import controls, still offers a basic price, at the moment US$310 a tonne.
This is the minimum price a Zimbabwean farmer can expect since the GMB is still obliged to buy all maize it is offered.
Millers are easily outbidding the parastatal, prepared to pay up to US$350 a tonne, or roughly what they say it costs them to import maize.
That landed cost of imports, in effect, sets an upper limit on what Zimbabwean farmers can earn and, they must realise, they are being paid more than the farmers who produce the imports in Zambia and South Africa. The transport costs, and the hassle of clearing shipments, is the bonus that millers can afford to pay their local suppliers.
They have to pay an importer or a farmer US$350, so obviously it is easier to pay the farmer.
So long as Zimbabwe produces less than it consumes, and climate change and other factors make it likely that this will be the case in the medium term, Zimbabwean farmers are likely to do better than farmers in grain surplus countries.
For a very long time Zimbabwean farmers and Zimbabwean consumers, plus the unfortunate taxpayers, suffered a cycle of booms and busts owing to major distortions in the markets.
We remember when pig farmers were buying roller meal for stock feed, since thanks to these distorting subsidies, meal was cheaper than maize.
We also remember the huge losses we incurred with storing grain no one wanted to buy, plus the huge costs when the taxpayer was expected to import maize to sell at a loss.
Subsidies were always a blunt instrument and eventually failed in their goal to provide cheap food.
Subsidies produce two main problems. The first is that the rich benefit far more than the poor.
Big rich farmers milked the Treasury as they grew maize, often in environmentally unsustainable ways, and rich families bought far more meal than poorer families, many of whom grow much of their own needs, even in cities, to cut costs.
The second problem of subsidies is that inefficient farmers, or farmers living in regions where maize is a poor choice, were encouraged to grow the grain, and consume and waste subsidised fertiliser while they did so.
We are now paying for those inefficiencies. This is not to say that the Government must not help the poor. It must do so and it does do so. But the handouts are now targeted at those who need them, not at the urban elite, who definitely can cope on their own.
The end of subsidies has also seen a boom in farm incomes for many. Tobacco is returning to its old levels and new records are likely to be set soon. Farm incomes, as a result, are higher and farmers more prosperous than they were when they were making bad choices in distorted markets.
The farm production we are now seeing in all sectors is real production with farmers getting world prices for their produce and sometimes, as we now see with maize, a little more because they deliver.
What is now needed to boost production is not a return to subsidies, but rather an expansion of normal farm credit, something the introduction of bankable 99 year leases is likely to do.
Online Reporter