Episode 3: Three Farmers, One Future
In the last episode, I talked about the Fast Track Land Reform Programme — the political volcano that erupted in 2000 and reshaped the country. We looked at the aftermath and the new government policies and programs to rebuild the agricultural sector.
But policies and programs are one thing. The reality on the ground is another. In this episode, I want to take you onto the farms themselves. To understand the state of agriculture in Zimbabwe now, you need to walk in the shoes of the people who work the land.
So let’s meet three farmers. Their stories are different, but their futures are all tied to the same soil, the same rains, and the same economic environment.
The Subsistence Farmer
Our first farmer, let’s call her Evelyn, lives in Matabeleland South, not far from where my Rangelands project is based. This is one of those semi-arid regions I spoke of. She has a small plot of land in a communal area, where her family has lived for generations.
Her biggest challenge is simple: survival. She is one of the many Zimbabweans whose primary livelihood is agriculture. But her farming is a constant gamble against the weather. She plants maize every year, relying entirely on the rain, but the rains have become more and more erratic. Most years, what she harvests is only enough to feed her family for three months. For the rest of the year, she depends on money sent home from family members working in South Africa. She also has a small herd of goats, and she will occasionally sell one or two of them when she has expenses to pay, like school fees, or if one of her children gets sick and she needs to buy medication.
There is a community-owned irrigation scheme five kilometres from Evelyn’s homestead, and she, along with a group of 30 other farmers, used to grow crops such as maize and sugar beans year-round. A pump and key water delivery pipes, however, broke three years ago and they did not have the capital for the repairs. This made the scheme non-functional, and they hope a donor or the government will step in to get it operating again.
She’s trapped in a cycle. The low yields she is currently achieving through her farming mean she is struggling to provide for her family, let alone save any money to invest in better seeds, fertilizer, or a borehole or well to better climate-proof her livelihood. She also has no formal title to her land. It’s communal — and has been allocated to her family by a traditional leader, authorised by the local Chief. She can’t walk into a bank and get a loan. So, she can’t invest, she can’t grow, and she can’t escape poverty. Her situation is made worse by the land itself, which is suffering from decades of overcrowding and unsustainable practices like overgrazing, and growing the same crops in the same field year on year, depleting the soil of its nutrients.
For Evelyn, the opportunity lies in programs like Pfumvudza, the climate-smart agriculture technique I mentioned in Episode 2. If she gets the right training and support, she can dramatically improve her yields on a small plot, improving her family’s food security.
The other hope is for the community irrigation scheme to be rehabilitated, and then put under more professional management, whereby the scheme can grow higher-value crops, as well as put money aside for an active maintenance program that will ensure the infrastructure can support the farmers into the future.
Right now, however, her existence is precarious, entirely vulnerable to the next drought, and reliant on government handouts and family abroad when her crops fail or she falls on tough times.
The Small-Scale Commercial Farmer
Let’s travel to a different part of the country, to an A2 farm. These were the larger plots created during the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, intended to create a new class of indigenous commercial farmers. Here, we meet a young 30-year-old farmer, let’s call him Tawanda. He’s ambitious. He left school and went to university in Zimbabwe and received an agricultural degree. He’s interned at a number of farms, and has a breadth of experience from across the country. He isn’t just farming to survive; he’s farming to build a business — and he’s also passionate about it.
Tawanda grows cash crops like potatoes, tomatoes and carrots for the domestic market. But he faces a different set of obstacles. Like Evelyn, he struggles to access finance. The offer letter he holds on his farm isn’t considered bankable collateral. So, in order to get started with his farming venture, he entered into an informal business agreement with a local businessperson in town, agreeing to share profits. It enabled him to invest in a water pump to pump from an old borehole, as well as drip irrigation to irrigate a two-hectare land area. He cannot afford a tractor or farm implements, but he hires these on an informal basis.
Tawanda’s venture into his own farming operation was a steep learning curve. In his first season, the rains arrived early, and there was huge demand for tractors from surrounding farmers like him. He ended up paying a premium for the tractor to prepare his lands, and he planted a bit later in the season than ideal — but he got his crops in the ground.
He then operates largely in the informal sector. He hires workers on a casual basis and sells his produce for cash at the side of the road or at markets in the nearby town. He’s competing with thousands of other small producers, who typically all flood the market with the same types of produce at the same time, so prices are inevitably low. He also doesn’t own a vehicle, so has to pay local taxi drivers to get his goods to market. The taxi driver isn’t always reliable, and these delays sometimes lead to product losses after they’ve been harvested.
Because he’s outside the formal system, he has no tax obligations, which could be perceived as a benefit, but it also means he’s invisible. He therefore can’t build a formal track record to get a loan which would help grow his business.
Tawanda is getting by, but he concedes that after he has covered all of the input costs and shared his revenue with his business partner in town, he is breaking even at best, and doesn’t see the path to scaling up his business into what he’d dreamed it would become.
One of his options would be to do a joint venture. A joint venture would enable somebody else to come and invest in his farm, but it means he would no longer be in the driver’s seat, and the lion’s share of the returns would go to the joint venture partner. It would likely mean he would move on and try to find work elsewhere, while receiving a share of revenue or profit from what is being grown on his land. Given Tawanda’s passion for farming and wanting to grow his own venture, this option is less than optimal.
His other, and the option he would prefer, is to get linked to a formal market. He dreams of supplying a supermarket or food processor on contract that would serve as a guaranteed buyer at a stable price, allowing him to plan, invest, and grow his business from the informal into the formal economy. The question is, however, where does he start? He would essentially need to get lucky, either through the right relationships, a government or NGO program, or some other fortuitous event that would help to establish guaranteed market offtake.
The Large-Scale Commercial Producer
Finally, let’s visit our third farmer. She’s a large-scale commercial citrus grower in Beitbridge, a neighbour of mine. Her farm is an engine of the local economy. It employs hundreds of people, growing over 100,000 citrus trees under high-tech irrigation systems and complying with global accreditations for export. Given this farm exports over 80% of its produce, it earns vital export revenue for the country.
You may think this farmer has it easy, but she has a different set of challenges that are just as daunting. She operates in a complex and often frustrating regulatory environment. For years, a major challenge has been foreign exchange regulations that require exporters to convert a portion of their US dollar earnings into the volatile local currency, effectively acting as a tax on success and limiting profits.
For a period of almost 20 years through the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, she stopped investing in the development of her farm altogether. Things were just too uncertain to be putting in new orchards, knowing that she wouldn’t see a decent return for at least seven years.
But her biggest source of anxiety is the same as the others: land tenure. Even with a 99-year lease, there’s a persistent sense of insecurity that discourages long-term investment. Why would you plant a citrus orchard that takes seven years to mature if you’re not absolutely certain you’ll still have the land in seven years’ time?
Her opportunities are immense. With a stable policy environment and truly secure tenure, she could double her production, create more jobs, and develop outgrower schemes to bring smaller farmers like Tawanda into her export value chain.
I’ve painted a picture of three farmers, with three very different realities. Yet, they are all bound by the same threads. They are all hampered by insecure land tenure and a lack of access to finance. And they all face an overarching threat that doesn’t care if they are subsistence, small-scale, or large-scale: the threat of climate change and economic instability.
That’s where we turn next.
In Episode 4, I’ll step beyond Zimbabwe and share some of the biggest lessons from my Nuffield travels — looking at how other countries are confronting labour, productivity, climate change, and the future of farming.
Links
Check out my Nuffield Report on the Future of Farming in Zimbabwe here
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