RYAN CHIGOCHE
Farmers have raised disquiet over high input costs, calling on the government to intervene, amid growing fears that most farmers will struggle to procure inputs for the forthcoming cropping season.
The apprehension comes at a time when prices for inputs have rocketed to a level beyond the reach of many farmers.
For example, a 50kg bag of top dressing fertiliser is now selling at US$60, a 33% increase from US$45 last year.
The cost of basal fertiliser has also gone up by almost 50% to between US$35-45 per 50kg from around US$25-30 last season.
The Zimbabwe National Farmers Union secretary general, Stewart Mubonderi, told Business Times that farmers would struggle to buy inputs.
“We have an excessive profiteering problem in our nation, where individuals want to earn a lot of money in one night, but there will be very few buyers due to the high prices,’’ Mubonderi said.
“So we ask the corporations doing this to be sensible and provide farmers with fair pricing, and also the government to engage them constructively and ensure that these unwarranted price increases we are seeing are stopped and avoided.”
The president of the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union, Shadreck Makombe said the high input prices would affect the 2022/23 season.
“There is a need for the government to intervene in the short term through targeted and time limited input subsidies so as to alleviate the plight of vulnerable farmers and to ensure affordable and viable inputs,’’ Makombe said.
He appealed to businesses to be “ethical in their pricing because you would see that the price of diesel is fluctuating of late”.
“It [the price of diesel] has been going down. We would have expected the prices of goods to also go down in tandem with the going down of diesel, which is one of the major inputs in prices. Unfortunately it’s not happening that way. So at the end of the day farmers are the ones who are suffering,” Makombe said.
He proposed that manufacturers deal directly with farmers to cut “these middle persons” whose approach is very “opportunistic” in nature to mitigate the prohibitive costs.
“The current input costs prices are very high and are discouraging to farmers. What it means is if one has planned to plant 1 or 2 ha because of these costs he might end up planting maybe a quarter of that and productivity will be reduced,” Makombe said.
Compounding the farmers’ plight is the high interest rates which are currently pegged at 200%.
