HARARE Zimbabwes tobacco selling season kicked off in Harare last week with 77 million kg of the crop expected to have been auctioned by the end of sales in the second half of the year. Prices opened at about US$4.00 per kg for the best grade which was lower than the top price of $5.50 per kg that farmers had expected. There is other tobacco from Brazil, China, Malawi and Tanzania, but that does not match ours (in terms of flavour). The price should be good . anything less than 5.50 per kg is not acceptable,” acting agricultural minister Ignatius Chombo told farmers, buyers and merchants at the Tobacco Sales Floor in Harare.
The minister said he expected prices to pick up by April. Production this year is higher than the 58 million kg produced last year but remains a far cry from the 220 million kg sold in 2000 before President Robert Mugabe ruined tobacco farming and the agricultural sector in general with his chaotic and bloody land reform programme of the past decade.
The land reforms that Mugabe says were necessary to correct a colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to poor soils, saw the bulk of Zimbabwe 4 500 commercial farmers who were the countrys most skilled and largest crop producers evicted from their farms sometimes at gun point.
But black villagers resettled on former white farms could not maintain production because the government failed to support them with skills training, financial and other resources required to run commercial agriculture.
Post published in: Economy