In messy farming inputs scam
“The owner of the company is my brother and I can’t defraud my brother’s company.”
Chelesani Moyo, the TIMB public relations officer, confirmed receiving Hamandishe’s complaint.
“TIMB received a complaint from a farmer disgruntled about deductions by a contractor, who never availed the said inputs to the farmer,” Moyo said.
“We engaged the inspectorate department to undertake the necessary investigations in order to resolve the issue in an amicable manner.
The TIMB had not availed findings of its purported investigation by the time of going to print.
Moyo added: “In order to bring sanity to the industry, we will work towards resolving any disputes that are brought to our attention.
“We have different departments that serve different purposes and, depending on the nature of the dispute, we will aim at resolving the issue at hand.”
Hamandishe confirmed that TIMB was involved in solving his dispute, but he felt he was being tossed around. “TIMB…suspends rogue tobacco firms.
“We recently suspended two contracting companies’ licenses and also deactivated a number of growers who were found wanting,” said Moyo, without naming the offending companies and farmers.
Hamandishe believes numerous other farmers have fallen victim to fraud by Voedsel employees.
“There are many others like me who are in such situations, but they don’t know the channels to use to lodge their complaints and end up accepting losses,” he said.
“I was lucky because I used social media to express my concerns but others are not aware of such platforms.”
Voedsel director, Tennyson Hwandi did not respond to questions sent to him.
Contract farming is an attractive option to local farmers who cannot access funding from banks and other sources.
However, because of ignorance of desperation, many farmers have been duped by contractors.
A number of Zimbabweans ventured into tobacco farming after the fast track land reform programme, which resulted in a massive growth of the sector.
Agrarian experts Freedom Mazwi, Walter Chambati and George Mudimu in their paper titled: Tobacco contract farming in Zimbabwe: power dynamics, accumulation trajectories, land use patterns and livelihoods attribute the rise in the number of contract farmers to better extension services, improved and guaranteed access to input and output markets.
They say at the same time, “tobacco contract farming is marked by several vicissitudes.”
“Some farmers withdrew from contracts due to low output prices and high input costs resulting in indebtedness,” the paper says.
“Similarly some contracting firms dropped out from the contracting arrangements.
“Overall, many contracted growers accumulated more than non-contract farmers.”
Other investigations revealed that some companies that offer tobacco contract farming facilities were manipulating poor farmers by arbitrarily amending their contract agreements in order to under pay them.
Others simply refuse to pay farmers after they deliver their tobacco or deduct more money than they loaned out to the farmers, leaving many in serious debt.