Bonus Matashu points to a three-ton
truck he bought for $15,000 in cash and says President Robert Mugabe’s often violent program of seizing white-owned farms and
giving them to black Zimbabweans turned around his life.
“This is the best thing that could have happened to me and
my family and the generality of black Zimbabweans,” the former
machine operator said at his six-hectare (15-acre) farm near the
tobacco-farming town of Karoi, 93 miles north of the capital,
Harare. “I now lead a far better life.”
Matashu, 34, was allocated land by the government in 2001
after a white-owned farm was seized and its former owner
emigrated to South Africa, he said in an Oct. 18 interview. He
grew cotton for a decade before switching to tobacco. This year
he earned $34,000 and won an award for being the best small-scale tobacco farmer in Karoi.
During the turbulence of the farm takeovers, tobacco
production in what was the second-biggest exporter of the top
quality variety of the crop known as flue-cured plunged to 48.3
million kilograms in 2008 from a record 236.7 million kilograms
(521.8 million pounds) in 2000, according to the Zimbabwe
Tobacco Association. Now it’s making a comeback, with this
year’s 166.7 million kilograms earning about $612 million.
Mugabe said he embarked on the land-grab program in 2000 to
address the expropriation of land from blacks during the 90
years of white rule that ended after a civil war in 1980. While
it helped him win rural votes and retain power, the economy was
gripped by a decade of contraction, with plummeting exports of
crops ranging from tobacco to roses.
Farmers Killed
About 18 white farmers were killed in violent takeovers of
their land while almost all of the country’s 620,000 permanent
and seasonal farmworkers were driven away from their homes, John
Worsley-Worswick, the head of of Justice for Agriculture, a
Harare-based lobby group, said in an interview on Oct. 28.
Together with dependents those workers accounted for two
million people, he said.
“We tackled the enemy head on and we got the land,”
Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said in an interview. “They
will never, never accept that there are now new owners on the
land who have done wonders.”
Most of the rest Zimbabwe’s agricultural industry remains
in crisis. The rose and horticulture export business, formerly
worth $87 million a year, has largely disappeared. Once a corn
exporter, Zimbabwe has regularly imported the grain in recent
years, buying almost 97,000 tons from South Africa since the
beginning of May. That’s the most in a single season since at
least the marketing season that ended in April 2010, according
to South African Grain Information Service data.
Industry Change
The tobacco industry no longer resembles the pattern of
large, white-owned, farms, which have been seized and resettled.
In 2000 the crop was grown by 1,500 large-scale farmers
while 5,000 small-scale growers produced 3 percent of the crop.
This year 110,000 small-scale farmers grew 65 percent of the
crop, according to the government’s Tobacco Industry Marketing
Board. While most of the tobacco used to be auctioned most is
now grown under contract for leaf merchants. Companies including
Universal Corp. (UVV:US) and Alliance One International Inc. (AOI:US) buy the
crop.
More than a fifth of the growers were registered this year,
and farmers are being encouraged to grow the crop in the more
arid region of Matabeleland, where little tobacco has been
produced before.
“It took the minority more than 50 years to reach 220
million kilograms,” said Lovemore Chikweya, regional
coordinator for the TIMB in Nyamandhlovu, 370 kilometers
southwest of Harare, in an interview. “With these new farmers
that number can and will be surpassed within five years,” he
said, forecasting production at 200 million kilograms in 2014.
China Exports
With the violence associated with the land reform program
and a series of disputed election resulting in sanctions
targeting Mugabe and his allies from the European Union and the
U.S., Zimbabwe’s tobacco farmers are now exporting more of their
crop to Asia.
“Our exports to China have grown by over 50 percent,”
said Rodney Ambrose, chief executive officer of the Zimbabwe
Tobacco Association, in an interview. “We have also established
new markets particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia.”
This year Chinese buyers acquired $197 million worth of
tobacco while Belgium bought $102 million, according to the
TIMB.
Zimbabwean tobacco sold for an average of about $3.67 a
kilogram this year, the highest since at least 1990, compared
with $3.65 for tobacco produced in Brazil, one of the country’s
biggest competitors, according to Ambrose.
“People are seeing that you can grow the crop and it comes
in handy because the returns are much higher compared to wheat
and cabbages,” Shandu Gumede, a 43-year-old farmer in
Matabeleland, said in an interview. “I have no regrets.”
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