More funding needed for our farmers

Evans Zininga
I grew up on a tobacco farm in Doma. We had more than a life to enjoy and cherish. It was always green throughout the year, not because the farmers were rich then, but because they had enough funding for their projects every season.
I have taken time to go back in time to the 80s and 90s and Zimbabwe has a very strong history of funding its farmers. It defeats me today that farmers are left out in the cold by the very people who will come and point fingers and say farmers are not serious. Is there enough on the table to keep the farmers happy and bankrolled?

There has been a lot of funding programmes for agriculture over the years, some of which I have also benefited from. Most banks are posting losses every year despite investing in other businesses other than agriculture. So where does the farmer stand?

The banks have a procedure for approving the loans but I have a feeling they know a lot of the money they are lending out is not going to intended businesses but rather it is going to the streets and other things which can spin the money faster and quicker.

Government, together with some non-governmental organisations, has availed a lot of funding through various structures but farmers are crying foul against banks as they are sitting on their papers without access to the inputs for the season.

Can someone please tell the NGOs to stop crippling us with food aid and convert all those resources to assist in agriculture production, self-sufficiency and empowerment!
The banks are happy as long as they get their money back with interest, in the shortest possible time frame.

The Government has come up with programmes before and we all know how much they were abused by stakeholders. I know farmers who still brag about not paying back even a cent to the GMB Maguta scheme and they know no one is going to come after them as they know the system was compromised by most executors.

I have been turned down by my banker who said to me my proposal was perfect but they are just not funding long-term projects as the bank needs money quicker than six months a farmer would need to turn his crop into cash. Some crops even take up to 10 months before you can make the sales.

My heart bleeds for tobacco farmers. Farmers used to have loans availed at the beginning of every season and terms were put in place to accommodate them and their projects.

Banks would scramble for farmers and it was profitable too. Now there is a bulk of NGOs all over the show and they are giving conditional funding where certain individuals will benefit and the farmer is left crippled. Free food and inputs are tools towards destroying the farmers and funding that ensures that a farmer gets what they need to prosper would do much better.

Right now we are in the planting season of our winter wheat and barley crops, but everyone is at ease, no one is making noise. Zimbabwe requires 450 000 tonnes of wheat per annum and where do we hope to get that much?

There is another type of funding which is now being abused as well by many — contract farming. Under contract farming farmers are supplied with inputs by an organization which seeks to benefit from the product in various ways.

Contractors may shift goal posts when time to deliver and pay comes where as the farmers may also take the contractors for a ride by defaulting on deliveries or side marketing.

There are a lot of risks in trying to get a crop by contract farming and this is so because there is not enough funding on the table for framers to benefit from.

Contract growers are not money lending organisations, they are rather businesses whose core business is to make profit out of the crops they grow and it is pathetic to see farmers abusing this facility in many ways. I have been a victim of contract farming abuse through corporate structures before.

Executives fill their friends, relatives, girlfriends and associates in place that would rather have been allocated to professional farmers. When they do not get the yields, they wonder what might have gone wrong! I am sorry, but I just do not understand it. All we then can say is contract farming needs fine turning in Zimbabwe.

I have followed statistics from the previous season and it is clear that in the 1980s and 1990s there was a lot of subsidising towards small-scale farming through agricultural funding schemes.

The commercial sector was active then and the two complemented each other towards end of season yields. Now the commercial sector is crippled because there is just not enough funding on the table to sustain commercial production.

For instance in the season 2008-2009, Zimbabwe recorded a yield of 124 257,1 tonnes out of 152 178 hectares which comes to a 0,8 tonnes/ha yield of maize across the board.

Of this 41percent came from the communal farmers and 21 percent from the A1 schemes. Commercial farmers have 40 percent to their name and it shows very clearly that there is something not right in the system.

These figures are very low as Zimbabwe has produced twice as much and more before. There is so much potential in the farming sector in Zimbabwe but availability of cash to fund inputs, labour and other things is absent. What happened to the Ten Tonne Club concept?

Legislation comes in and out of the structures; we sang praises when an initiative to make our 99 year leases bankable with financial institutes. Most farmers, especially the still happily termed “new farmers”, would hardly ever have enough requirements for the bank’s liking.

Most banks demand my town house’s title deeds as collateral security for even as low as $10 000 loans.

Will the ordinary farmer risk a family savings property for such little money?

To me, that is not fair. It is just an unnecessary bottleneck in the system.

It encourages shady transactions because Zimbabweans are a hard working and hard thinking people, they would find a way to go around these systems somehow.

I can bet that creditworthy projects have been denied loans and funding at the expense of unrealistic and to some extent, questionable proposals.

It is a fact — no farmers, no future, but these farmers need support from all angles as it is just so unbearable to farm in Zimbabwe without funding.

A bag of fertiliser in other countries in the region costs +/-$7,00 and it is six times or more in Zimbabwe. Who cannot tell something needs to be done sooner to get farmers rolling and position our country back to its position as the bread basket of Southern Africa?

There is food for thought for all involved parties in agriculture in Zimbabwe, thus – Is there funding to all the farmers? How is it working?

Who is benefiting? Where does the future of farming lie in Zimbabwe?

What do we need to do to improve the funding of agricultural projects with no strings attached to it?