By Prof Sheunesu Mpepereki and Eng Raymond Munyaradzi Nazare

IN 2013, the Zimbabwe Government launched the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-ASSET) planned to run from October 2013 until December 2018 in pursuit of a new trajectory of accelerated economic growth and wealth creation.
The vision of the plan is ‘Towards an Empowered Society and a Growing Economy’.
Zim-ASSET’s mission is ‘To provide an enabling environment for sustainable economic empowerment and social transformation to the people of Zimbabwe’.
We must emphasise that Zim-ASSET is a national agenda. We should all know that an agenda has items to be attended to.
The Zim-ASSET agenda items are identified by clusters, with Food and Nutrition as the first of four pillars reflecting the strong need to fully exploit the internal relationships and linkages that exist between the various facets of Zimbabwe’s economy.
Command Agriculture is a central item on the Zim-ASSET agenda; it cannot be viewed as a rival programme.
Our food and nutrition security anchors and sustains our independence and sovereignty. Command Agriculture empowers all sectors of our economy providing jobs and boosting industrial capacity utilisation through supply of raw materials harvested from the farms.
The Command Agriculture Programme seeks to ensure Zimbabwe’s food security through capacitating local production to eliminate staple food imports, generate surpluses for beneficiation and export in order to earn the economy foreign exchange to be channelled to other productive sectors.
Since agriculture is highly technical, farmers and other value chain actors require relevant skills and knowledge anchored by appropriate technical and advisory support services to ensure sustainable, efficient and profitable production systems which address the objectives of our national goals as outlined in the Zim-ASSET and Food and Nutrition policy documents.
We are pleased to note the spirited efforts of Government and various stakeholders to mobilise financial and material resources to be ploughed into the Command Agriculture Programme.
Are the farmers competent and ready to utilise the availed resources and produce sustainably?
We ask this question because resources alone are not enough. As Zimbabweans say: Mari hairimi; chinorima vanhu! Imali kayilimi! kulima abantu!
This is to emphasise the critical importance of investing in people skills and competencies to ensure that they competently and efficiently carry out all the Command Agriculture operations in profitable and sustainable ways.
We refer to this as provision of technical support services.
The pungwe approach is critical here; before the comrades rushed into battle, they took time to educate the ‘povo’ on the justification for the war to ensure buy-in.
Farmers and other staff must be educated on the technicalities of producing high yields at farm level by organising training meetings (equivalent to pungwes) even under a fig tree.
When the farmers subsequently meet challenges in the field, they will have the ammunition (knowledge, skills) to tackle them or to consult experts using the now readily available electronic Information and Communication Technologies.
But let us begin by examining the elements of a sustainable agricultural system of which the farmer is but a part.
A sustainable agricultural system is one in which all actors in the supply/value chain generate value (profit in some instances). Let us identify the various categories of actors and their roles in a sustainable agricultural system.
The actors include consumers of the raw materials and value-added products created from the agricultural products (general population, livestock industry etc.)
Examples can be listed as follows:
l Entities involved in the local and external (exporters) distribution of the products.
l Industries involved in post-harvest processing of the products (livestock feed industry, food industry including the milling, confectionery, oil processors, leather industry, etc.)
l Entities involved in supplying agricultural raw materials to the processing industries.
l Farmers involved in producing the raw materials off the land.
l Industries involved in supplying agricultural production inputs such as seed, fertiliser, herbicides, packaging industries, the transportation sector and those supplying mechanisation inputs.
l Entities involved in supplying support services and the respective infrastructure (fuel supplies, transport, machinery after sales service, warehousing, distribution, financing etc.)
l Institutions/individuals that/who invest resources to allow farmers, processors, distributors and those supplying support services to operationalise their businesses.
For an agricultural system to be sustainable, value chain actors must be motivated to invest.
The critical question is: How do we set up these value chains to ensure we can motivate all the actors to invest in their respective areas of specialisation?
Below we pause critical questions relating to how we can encourage the different actors in the agricultural system to play their parts. We then indicate what we consider critical for the actors to move.
l The first question is: How do we ensure that consumers of agricultural products continue to absorb/eat the products in sufficient volumes to motivate distributors to invest in the distribution industry?
The answer is that the products, whether food or industrial raw materials, should be availed at prices that encourage significant levels of consumption. In short, we should have lower prices for the products without subsidies.
l The next question is: How do we ensure that exporters of raw and value-added products can generate profit from the export exercise?
For that to happen, there has to be a significant difference in favour of the exporters, between the export market price and the cost of supplying the products to the same external markets. Issues relating to ‘ease of doing business’ become relevant here.
l The third question revolves round how post-harvest industries can be sufficiently motivated to invest in the sector.
This is possible if there is a significant difference in favour of the post-harvest industries, between the market price for processed products and the cost at which they source their raw materials or agricultural produce.
l The fourth question is: How can actors involved in supplying agricultural raw materials to the processing industries generate sufficient value to stay in the business?
Again there must be sufficient differential between the price at which they source raw materials from farmers and that at which they sell to the processing/distribution/exporting sectors of the economy.
Farmers are emerging as a central factor in the whole equation. How then do we ensure that farmers involved in producing the raw materials off the land are sufficiently motivated to want to continue with the exercise?
Clearly farmers must be able to generate sufficient value from the production exercise irrespective of the local and external market environment.
This calls for highly efficient farmers producing at the lowest possible cost per tonne (US$/t) but with sufficient resources to scale out their production enterprises.
Low production costs per tonne improve competitiveness and generate increased demand on the local (for the food and processing industries) and external export markets.
Scaling out (from increased investment be it local/foreign) allows competitive farmers whose margins are squeezed because of the competition to generate significant value from producing volumes (economies of scale).
Another critical question is: How do we ensure that Industries involved in supplying agricultural production inputs such as seed, fertiliser, herbicides, packaging, transportation and those supplying mechanisation inputs generate fair value to sustain their operations?
The answer again revolves around the farmers.
Farmers can only generate demand for agricultural inputs if their produce is competitive on the market (saleable) and they are able to produce on a significant scale to ensure they generate value for themselves in very competitive markets.
Support services to farmers are critical for efficient production.
How do we ensure that actors involved in supplying support services and the respective infrastructure (fuel supplies, transport, machinery after-sales service, warehousing, distribution, financing etc.) generate sufficient value to maintain provision of the services?
Again, farmers can only generate demand for the services if their produce is competitive on the market (saleable) and they are able to produce on a significant scale to ensure they generate value for themselves in very competitive markets.
Another pertinent question is: How do we ensure that institutions/individuals that/who invest resources to allow farmers, processors, distributors and those supplying support services to operationalise their businesses, are sufficiently motivated to continue investing in the same industries?
The answer is simple: Input and service suppliers, processors, distributors and exporters need to run profitable enterprises to attract investment into their sectors.
We can now see that value chain actors upstream of farmers such as input and service suppliers rely on profitable farmers to generate demand for their products and services.
Downstream value chain actors such as processors, distributors and exporters rely on farmers who produce at the lowest possible cost (to generate significant value from creating a differential between their input costs and supply market prices) to allow their businesses to be competitive and produce significant volumes of product for the supply chain actors to then reap value.
So we can see why the farmer is central to the functioning of the agricultural system.
Both downstream and upstream components of the agricultural value chain absolutely depend on efficient, productive and profitable farmers.
We must invest in capacitating our farmers physically, financially and technically for our agricultural systems to function sustainably.