Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister Tendai Biti has announced that the government would float grain bills valued at $5 million this week to purchase an additional 50,000 metric tonnes of maize as the country moves to rebuild strategic reserves depleted by years of poor harvests.
Biti told journalists in the capital Harare that the grain bills to be issued before the end of the week were the first part of a program under which the government would progressively buy more than 400,000 tonnes of surplus maize from local farmers.
“Very soon we will be issuing grain bills to finance the purchase. We are going to start with $5 million and the first issue will be by the end of this week,” said Biti.
He noted that Zimbabwe had a reasonable harvest from the 2008/09 farming season of some 1.2 million tonnes and that about a third of that was surplus to farmers’ personal requirements and therefore available on the market.
The maize purchased would go towards rebuilding Zimbabwe’s strategic grain reserves which have been depleted following nearly a decade of poor harvests largely blamed on the country’s land reform program which destroyed large-scale commercial food producers.
Source African Press Agency
