Zimbabwe is headed for another “gloomy” agricultural season because many farmers do not have access to fertiliser, chemicals and seed, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.
“Representatives of farmer organisations and the fertiliser industry … painted a gloomy picture of the coming season, saying there is nothing to talk about, owing to the failure to deliver inputs to farmers in time,” the state-controlled Herald said.
The paper quoted an official from the fertiliser industry, Onisai Machiridza, who said companies have not been given the foreign currency needed to buy inputs to manufacture fertiliser.
Machiridza said that while there were a few stocks of fertiliser, “these had already been bought”.
He said companies that manufacture fertiliser locally need $37-million before December to be able to produce 178 000 tonnes of the commodity.
Zimbabwe is in the grips of a severe foreign-currency crisis.
Companies have to apply to a twice-weekly foreign-currency auction for cash allocations, but bids always massively exceed the amount of foreign currency available.
The Reserve Bank Governor, Gideon Gono, said this week that allocations of foreign currency, including to the vital agricultural sector, have been cut back over the past two months to allow Zimbabwe to pay back part of its debt arrears to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Zimbabwe has faced repeated food shortages since President Robert Mugabe’s government launched a controversial land-reform programme in 2000, which has seen about 4 000 white farmers losing their farms.
The government blames the crop failures on drought, but critics say the inexperience of new farmers and their lack of capital is also to blame.
The World Food Programme says more than four million Zimbabweans — one-third of the population — will need food aid by next March. — Sapa-DPA