Zimbabwe's production of tobacco, one of the country's key foreign exchange earners, has been declining for six years due to the disruption of commercial farming in an effort at land reform. The large scale white commercial farmers who dominated the tobacco sector for several decades have now largely been replaced by small-holder black farmers, many of whom are still battling to learn the ropes of commercial farming.
Apart from dealing with problems common to smallholders anywhere, they have also had to contend with a hyper-inflationary economic environment (estimated at 1800% as of April 2007). Coal to cure the crop and fuel to transport it are often inconsistently available, and erratic rain seasons have only worsened the plight of the new farmers. Many of the new entrants to tobacco farming are also trying this once very lucrative crop at a time of growing world wide competition, as well as pressure from the anti-tobacco lobby, which have not helped tobacco prices.
55 million kg of tobacco was harvested in 2006, the smallest yield in close to thirty years. The anticipated yield at the start of the 2007 tobacco auction season in April is expected to be 70 million kg, the first upward trend in several years. But the rebound in production is now threatened by labour shortages, as farm labourers find wages far out of sync with inflation. Many have turned to other ways of making a living, including informal mining.
Lovegot Tendengu, the executive director of the Farmers Development Trust (FDT), an organisation which supports smallholder tobacco farmers, said the serious shortage of farm workers is crippling harvesting operations in the country's three main tobacco growing regions. "There is a shortage of labour because there are now too many farmers. The labour market has not expanded because gold and diamond mining pays more. Most people prefer mining and that has deprived farmers of labour," said Tendengu.
Farmers say crops are staying too long in the fields and delays in harvesting would ruin them. Growers' associations say a perennial conflict between farm labourers and employers over wages has forced an ever-increasing number of workers to head for neighbouring countries to look for alternative employment.
Growers are also battling with the critical shortage of raw materials such as wrapping paper and hessian sacks. "How can we ship tobacco for auctioning when it is not wrapped? And even if we were to finish grading the tobacco there often no fuel to transport it. We would like an approach to tobacco marketing like they have in Uganda, where merchants buy from the growing areas. The situation needs to change," Tendengu said.
Financial Gazette
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