Zimbabwe’s farmers have warned of a “looming disaster” as a funding crisis threatens to drastically slash agricultural output during the forthcoming farming season and condemn the country to another year as a net food importer.
The Commercial Farmers Union, which represents the mainly white large-scale growers, on Thursday said its members were struggling to access funding from the banking sector and were largely unprepared for the 2009/10 farming season due to start at the end of October.
The farmers blamed the cash crunch on the decision by the new coalition government to adopt a basket of multiple currencies that replaced the worthless Zimbabwe dollar as legal tender.
The situation has been compounded by the inability of the new government to win international financial injections which would have created liquidity within the domestic banking sector to enable banks to lend to farmers.
Problems for the large-scale farmers are also worsened by the fact that they cannot access facilities run by non-governmental organizations and multilateral organizations like the World Bank which donate farm inputs to vulnerable groups.
The lack of funds has seen farmers planting just over 20 percent of their normal hectarage, an unhealthy scenario for a country where agriculture is the backbone of the rest of the economic sectors.
Source African Press Agency
