The ManicaPost
FARMING is a serious business in which every farmer hopes for a return on their investment within a specific period of time.
Farmers need a profit to buy seeds, fertiliser, draught power, machinery, new technology to improve the next crop output. They need money to fix broken equipment, maintain farm infrastructure and to constantly improve their education and acquire analytical and critical-thinking skills to make sound decisions on how to improve crops and harvests. These are the pillars of any successful farmer.
However, what we are witnessing in the grain divide of our agriculture sector — where GMB continues treating maize farmers with irritating disdain — makes us wonder if we are pulling in the same direction with comrades at the helm of this once mighty grain utility. GMB needs cleansing. The parastatal is to blame for perennially failing to pay farmers on time. This has impacted negatively and drowned most farmers in serious debts.
Elsewhere in this publication we carry a story in which Minister Didymus Mutasa, himself a successful maize farmer, who has carved a niche of delivering hundreds of tonnes of maize and wheat at GMB, threw his sharp knife deep into the operations of the utility. We agree with Cde Mutasa that GMB’s operations have been ageing and shrinking over the years.
Healthy people grow. Healthy animals grow. Healthy trees grow. Healthy organisations grow. Growth is a characteristic that God supernaturally breathed into all living things, but sadly not GMB. So, when a company is not growing, it is helpful to ask: Why not? If we understand the reason for non-growth, it is easier to accurately diagnose and prescribe the cure. Cde Mutasa is spot on. GMB is in death throes; it needs overhauling, fresh vision and direction.
The company is rooted in past ideologies of singing for its supper — money to pay wages and grain — from Government. The grain utility is synonymous for its flowery strategic workshops at affluent hotels, where endless proposals to turn around its fortunes are made, but in the end, chabuda hapana. It will end as fallacious imaginations. Yet we all know that the “poverty at GMB” in a world of food abundance, is principally a result of negligence and lies within mankind’s incapacity to put in place the policies, institutions, technologies and logistics to boost agriculture, prevent and eradicate suffering among its clients.
Can you blame farmers for converting their maize farms to the big money-spinning tobacco crop? Maize farmers are frustrated by poor returns on grain. GMB goes for two to three years without paying farmers and how can one dissuade them from converting their maize fields to the big money-spinning tobacco? We criticise GMB, and rightly so, for not facing up to the need to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by creating conditions for higher levels of investment in agriculture and rural development.
Why has GMB failed to lure partners and roll out maize contracting systems in which it will assist farmers with inputs and chemicals as is the case in the tobacco sector?
We all know that our grain is in high demand worldwide because of its non-GMO nature, but GMB has failed to exploit that advantage to transform maize production to unprecedented levels to enable it export surplus. It does not make economic sense for the GMB to be there to purchase grain from farmers and then mill it without being involved in supporting farmer initiatives in the fields so that we produce more.
What hurts most is that GMB still fails to pay the supplying farmers after processing and selling the maize-meal products.
Knowing Cde Mutasa as a man who does not mince his words, we take his word for what it is. We expect him, as per his word, to pursue the revival of this dying parastatal. Maize farmers are pinning their hopes on your wise words for reprieve.
They cannot bear it anymore. GMB’s redundancy and decay has exposed them to middlemen who buy the produce for a song.
