Continued decline in Zimbabwe’s tobacco production could bring the tobacco industry “to its knees” if unchecked, a Zimbabwe Parliamentary committee has been told.
According to the country’s state-owned The Herald newspaper, the tobacco industry painted a gloomy picture on the state of preparedness ahead of this year’s season because of “numerous challenges” faced.
On Tuesday, tobacco auction-floors representative Wilson Nyabonde told the Parliamentary portfolio committee on lands, agriculture, resettlement, rural resources and water development that with the introduction of the dual marketing system, auction floors continue to see declining sales with only between 17-million and 20-million kilograms expected this selling season, The Herald said.
“This is far below the pick of 237-million kilograms in 2000, representing a 7% to 8% utilisation of available capacity for the auction floors in the country.”
Nyabonde was quoted as saying that if the decline in production continued, it would not be surprising that this could be the last year for tobacco auctioning in the country.
“The signals are that with this trend, auctions will become a thing of the past,” he said.
If auction floors failed to open next year, thousands of jobs would be lost as well as world-class auctioning facilities. To restart them later may not be possible, he added.
“Auction-floors initiatives to rebound the crop have been met with serious difficulties. In 2004, the auction floors lost $1-billion on funding growers and the money remained unrecovered,” he stated.
Nyabonde said the country had a serviceable infrastructure of curing facilities for a crop of 150-million kilograms, but most of the infrastructure was in the hands of non-tobacco growers.
Success stories of tobacco production like Brazil, he said, showed strong government participation in the funding of the crop.
The Herald reported Tobacco Growers’ Trust chairperson Wilfanos Mashingaidze as saying that despite the allocation of substantial resources to the tobacco sector, growth and productivity improvement had not been achieved largely due to inconsistent policies and implementation problems.
Mashingaidze said tobacco farmers, particularly smallholder farmers, had difficulties in accessing finance and inputs. The farmers were also affected by poor prices due to binding exchange-rate policies.
“A number of proposals have been submitted to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe by the Tobacco Growers’ Trust suggesting how to cushion the marginalised smallholder farmers, but these have largely been ignored,” Mashingaidze was quoted as saying. — I-Net Bridge