Zim''s Tobacco Industry on the ropes

Source from:  Citizen 06/15/2015

The tobacco auctioning season on Friday reached Day 68. However, about 20,769 growers who had sold their crop in the 2014 auctioning season have failed to do so this season.

Zimbabwe's chaotic land reform programme in 2000 saw thousands of black farmers accessing land from only about 5,000 white farmers who were into agriculture.

Now close to 100,000 black farmers are now into tobacco production, but in successive years, they are finding the going tough despite the huge tracts of land many of them have.

Asked about the trends in the sector, Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) chief executive officer Andrew Matibiri in an emailed response late Friday said: "The 20,000-odd farmers who registered and sold in 2014 (were) unlikely to register for this season."

He said the marketing season was now "too advanced and any farmer who grew tobacco would have registered and sold some of his or her produce by now. It is most likely that these farmers did not plant any tobacco at all or their crops failed".

Many farmers this year experienced several challenges such as crop failure, transport challenges and lack of knowledge on the production of the crop, among many others.

At the present moment, deliveries at both auction floors and contract sales have significantly gone down, from an average sales of four million kilograms (kg) a day to three million kg.

A TIMB weekly report said contractors' average daily throughput "has declined from a record high of 3,6m kg to the current 1,9m kg per day", adding auction floors continued to receive less deliveries per day compared to the same period last year.

"Auction sales are now averaging 650,000kg down from more than a million kilograms per day," the bulletin said.

Matibiri said the tobacco delivery rate was "closely related" to the growing season.

"We feel that the lower deliveries are due to yields because of the difficult growing season that was experienced by farmers," Matibiri said.

On Friday, the amount of the crop sold at the auction floors was lower by 10,21% as compared to the same period last year. Last year, 173,2m kg had been auctioned as compared to a lower 155,5m kg this year.

Sales have raked $462,6m in revenue this year, down 16% from last year's $550,7m over the same period.

The average selling price has also tumbled by 6,47%, from last year's $3,18 to this season's $2,97.

Last year, the auction ran for 99 days where on the last day, 209,9m kg of the crop had been sold at a value of $666,1m at local auction floors. This was against 2013's figure of 159,3m kg after 99 days at a value of $587,9m.

As yet, TIMB is yet to announce the last auction date of the season.

"Although deliveries are now low, industry stakeholders are yet to meet to consider the closing of the auction tobacco marketing season." Enditem