eBusiness Weekly
Conrad Mwanawashe
A RACKET involving Grain Marketing Board (GMB) employees and a network of middlemen could be costing the national granary millions of dollars through the sale of imported wheat and maize presented as domestic produce.
Locally produced maize and wheat fetch $390 per tonne and $500 per tonne respectively from GMB under a Government subsidy programme designed to empower farmers to boost production.
These prices are much higher than the landing costs for both crops with maize landing at about $200 per tonne meaning that the syndicate could be making at least about $200 per tonne of maize when they sell to the GMB.
The dealers could be making just about as much for wheat which lands at about $320 per tonne.
Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development Minister Dr Joseph Made was unavailable to comment on the latest developments.
But previously Dr Made has warned that Government would descend on unscrupulous dealers.
This comes at a time when GMB is battling middlemen who are short-changing farmers using cash to buy maize at prices as low as $100 per tonne for onward transmission to the national granary for $390 per tonne.
“We have heard reports about middlemen that are buying grain from farmers and reselling to the GMB,” said Zimbabwe Farmers Union director Paul Zakariya.
“They have cash and are buying at anything around $100 to $200 per tonne. They are making a killing. Farmers are being lured by cash so they end up losing grain to these middlemen because they want to hold cash in their hands. GMB is buying through mobile money or bank transfers but because of the cash shortages farmers end up falling for the middlemen’s offer,” he said.
GMB has no mechanism to tell whether grain being sold to the granary has been locally produced or imported. It also does not have any systems in place to ensure that only farmers, not middlemen, can sell to the granary.
GMB acting general manager Lawrence Jasi had not responded to an enquiry emailed to him by the time of going to print.
Government has deployed officials to assist beneficiaries on the correct moisture content, which middlemen have been using to short change farmers.
The dealers have been luring farmers to dispose of their grain rejected on account of high moisture content by the GMB at very low prices. The maize would be resold to the national granary at higher prices after drying it to acceptable levels.
The GMB, a wholly State-owned enterprise with a network of depots, is in the business of commodity trading in cereals and oil seeds, the provision of logistic services to the agricultural industry as well as processing of products.
It was set up to ensure national food security through production, procurement and management of the Strategic Grain Reserve and to transform the organisation into a commercially viable entity but has since been modified from being fundamentally a developmental or social institution to include being a commercially oriented commodity trading organisation.
