The annual trading season of Zimbabwe’s lucrative tobacco crop opens on Wednesday with an anticipated drop in production of about a third from last year.
Njodzi Machirori, the chairman of the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) estimated that between 100 and 120 million kilograms (220 -265 million pounds) of the leaf will be sold over the next six months.
The lower forecast figure is 65 million kilogram’s less than last year’s total, when 165 million kilogram’s were sold, and almost half of the production figure for 2001 which stood at 201,7 million kilos.
Machirori attributed the slump in production of the country’s top foreign exchange earner to a drought and delays by the government of President Robert Mugabe in giving agricultural inputs to black farmers who have been resettled on land seized from white farmers, many of them tobacco growers.
”Inputs, rains were late in coming,” said Machirori, dismissing the notion that the new black tobacco farmers did not know how to grow tobacco.
”It’s a fallacy that only whites know how to grow tobacco,” he said.
Of Zimbabwe’s 18 000 tobacco farmers, 1 300 are large-scale commercial growers — most of them white farmers. They produced about 70% of this year’s crop, according to Stanley Mutepfa, general manager of the TIMB.
Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa admitted at a news conference that there would be a drop in foreign exchange earnings that tobacco normally rakes in, but said it was because the agricultural sector was going through a ”transitional” period due to the land reforms.
”There will certainly be less foreign exchange coming through from the tobacco sector, but surely there will be room for improvement (next year),” he said.
Zimbabwe desperately needs foreign exchange revenue to import basic necessities like petroleum-based fuel, electricity and food.
”The forex will have to be earned by other sectors of the economy such as mining and tourism,” Murerwa told the news conference.
Although producing only about five percent of the total world flue-cured Virginia tobacco, Zimbabwe is traditionally the second largest exporter of the leaf after Brazil on the international market.
It accounts for about 19% of total world exports. Brazil exports about 29% of total global tobacco.
Tobacco usually earns 31% of the country’s foreign currency. – Sapa-AFP