The government has urged resettled farmers under-utilising land to consider joint ventures with investors or risk revocation of offer letters.
The Minister of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development Minister, Anxious Masuka, said his ministry has already developed a template for the joint venture agreement. Said Masuka:
The ministry is encouraging joint ventures, so if you think you do not have the capacity to farm, Zimbabwe wants production on your farm, so find someone who is able to assist you to farm.
The ministry has established a Joint Venture Unit and we have developed a template for an agreement between a farmer and someone who has the capacity to farm.
We are also creating a database of farmers who have offer letters, but who are not fully utilising their land and creating another database of those people who do not have land but have the capacity to farm.
So that we can do the matching of the farmer who has the land but not sufficiently utilising it and the investor who has the investment and finance, but has no land so that this government does not resort to saying each time we come to your farm, you are not productive, we withdraw your offer letter and give it to someone.
He said the template of the joint venture agreement was available on the ministry’s website.
Masuka urged farmers to take advantage of initiatives provided by the recently reestablished Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC). He said:
The Agricultural Finance Corporation has been reestablished to provide financing through the land and development bank.
But also because we realised that one of the issues is capacity at a farm level, you might not have the capacity to purchase a tractor at the farm level and we have given AFC initially 210 tractors.
Three weeks ago, we gave them an additional 400 tractors so that they can assist farmers with tillage operations this season.
We will add more, we think if AFC is leasing 1 500 tractors at any given time it means no farmer can fail to plant on time saying they have failed to receive adequate tillage.