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Dumisani Nsingo, Senior Farming Reporter
THE Zimbabwe Productive Farmers Association (ZPFA) has set sights on ensuring that farmers improve productivity and profitability of their agricultural enterprises while the country enhances its food security.
ZPFA secretary-general Mr Jethro Rombwa said the association had noted with concern that most farmers were facing a myriad of challenges towards ensuring the viability of their agricultural enterprises.
The association which comprises both commercial and smallholder farmers as well as war veterans was formed in 2016 to complement Government’s blueprint, the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset).
“We are trying to bring high production whereby we have individual farmers producing as much as 24 tonnes of maize, instead of achieving nominal tonnages as is the situation at the moment. Secondly, we are looking at having farmers attaining profits from the agricultural enterprises because as it is, we are having farmers that are saddled with non-performing loans and to address this we have developed a model which seeks to rectify these issues,” said Mr Rombwa.
He said in light of the effects of climate change which has culminated in erratic rainfall patterns, the association was promoting irrigation farming while also working towards reviving derelict irrigation schemes.
“We are also promoting irrigation because we realised that most of the farms have non-functioning irrigation infrastructure. There are two companies that we are working with, one of them is involved in borehole drilling and the other is a solar company, which offers state-of-art irrigation facilities that are solar-powered with solar pivots and drip irrigation facilities. It also has water pumps with a capacity of pumping one million litres of water a day,” said Mr Rombwa.
He said it was of paramount importance for farmers to invest in modern irrigation equipment so as to improve their yields.
“We are also working with a number of farmer oriented co-operatives and community irrigation schemes throughout the country and next week we are embarking on an outreach programme where we will be in Mutoko and the week after that we will be in Chipinge as we bid to assist these groups to improve on various farming issues. Most of them are using outdated or obsolete infrastructure and we feel there is a need for them to modernise and commercialise their agricultural activities,” said Mr Rombwa.
He said ZPFA was also engaged with financial institutions for asset finance or micro-credit facilities to enable farmers to acquire irrigation systems for their farms while efforts are being made to come up with a micro-financial institution tailor-made for farmers’ needs.
“We are also looking at farmers accessing conducive financial services and in that regard we are in the process of mobilising about 10 000 or more farmers and we raise equity for the formation of our own micro-credit institution because we feel the financial institutions we have don’t offer services which are tailor-made to suit farmers, in actual fact the interest rates are very high,” said Mr Rombwa.
He also said there was a need to harness water from various water bodies for irrigation purposes.
“For instance Matabeleland region has areas with abundant underground water and it’s our view that this should be harnessed for irrigation purposes and we are also looking at bringing in a system of agriculture which encourages farmers from this region to aggressively adopt certain agricultural activities which best suit their climatic conditions such as ranching, dairy, small stock rearing and even fisheries,” said Rombwa.
He said there is a need to channel more resources towards the agricultural sector as it is an integral sector towards reviving the country’s economy.
“We are working with a lot of Government ministries and we believe this model of farming is going to play a big part in reviving our economy because we have discovered that agriculture is the mainstay and sustainable sector of our economic recovery compared to mining.
“Improving productivity in agriculture will translate in prices of agricultural produce decreasing and culminate in us exporting and getting the much needed foreign currency and over and above all the livelihoods of farmers and profitability of farming enterprises improve,” said Mr Rombwa. @DNsingo
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