Harare — MRS Anna Chinyerere of Macheke harvested close to a tonne of groundnuts that she is finding very difficult to sell because no one in her village and its locality has the foreign currency with which to buy the produce.

This has left her with one option: filling empty five-litre cooking oil containers with groundnuts and exchanging them for whatever her fellow villagers can afford.

This could be a used pair of shoes, a bit of maize-meal, a few chicken pieces or anything else.

All the same, whatever it is that she trades with is often of far less value than the groundnuts she is parting with.

"We have no option but to sell our produce this year through barter trade because no one is willing to pay us in cash since everything has been dollarised.

"The people here do not have foreign currency and so we engage in barter. We cannot afford the transport costs to take our produce to the GMB. So we have no choice but to exchange our grain for whatever we can get," she says.

And so this creates a cycle of perpetual poverty.

Since no-one in the village has enough foreign currency to actively participate in the non-Zimbabwe dollar economy, no one can take produce to the GMB or the urban markets that will guarantee the generation of US or South African currency.

The foreign currency will, thus, stay in urban areas while the rural folk get very little of it. In the not-too- distant future this means people like Mrs Chinyerere will not even be able to plant a crop of maize or groundnuts because they cannot buy the inputs.

The general view of many urbanites has been that the introduction of the formal use of foreign currency and the subsequent shelving of the Zimbabwe dollar has eased their plight.

For years, the population was ravaged by rampant inflation. The use of the American dollar, the South African rand, the Botswana pula and the British pound, has eased the pressures exerted on urban households. Prices have been stabilised; people can once again plan and budget.

But all is not rosy, even for urbanites. In the towns and cities, people are taking home as little as US$30 every month and they are battling to make ends meet.

And to show that foreign currency use is a problem in town, just look at the inconveniences posed by the lack of small denominations and the continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as change in public transport.

For those earning substantial figures, things are all peachy and rosy. Unfortunately, there are very few such people.

The idea of setting aside the local currency was obviously taken without giving much consideration to the situation of people in the rural areas.

Unless they can put together enough money to come and market their produce in the towns and cities, they are doomed to engage in unsustainable barter trade for a living. Those with children in urban areas and in the Diaspora, who are well-off and/or caring enough to send money home, have a lifeline.

President Mugabe has raised his concerns about the whole idea of shelving the local unit in favour of the exclusive use of foreign currencies.

He has said that while the introduction of multiple foreign currencies has helped reduce inflation, it has caused untold suffering, particularly in the rural areas. There is no access to this money there: we cannot print it for ourselves to satisfy local demand  as we used to do with the Zimdollar.

He said this had forced rural people to trade their livestock and produce at unfair prices. "We cannot run such a country," he said. "In fact, we are looking at the whole matter of turning back to our currency.

"Although the prices of commodities have gone down, people however buy the same commodities with the money and when they do not have the money then, what is it that they are going to buy?" Mr Runho Kadharu, a grain miller, agrees with the President.

His business has not grown since the local currency was officially phased out and he cannot even afford to buy fuel to run his mills profitably.

"Most of the people pay for the grinding service with a portion of the maize or the sorghum that they bring to the grinding mill because they do not have the money," he said.

"And it is only now that the people can afford to pay this way because they have just harvested their crop. What will happen when the grain in their granaries runs out? How are they going to plant this coming season? What is going to happen to my business in the next six or so months?"

Then there is the political element of ditching a local currency in favour of other countries' money. University of Zimbabwe lecturer Dr Innocent Matshe argues that dollarisation is a global phenomenon that touches the sensitive political nerves of sovereignty.

Dr Matshe asserts that what was more urgent and important was to stabilise the local currency rather than rushing to legalise foreign currency as formal tender.

Economic analyst Dr Daniel Ndlela: agrees: dollarising is a short-term solution with few benefits.

Furthermore, he contends that the Reserve Bank has a key role to play in this stabilisation process, as has been seen from the examples of Zambia and Mozambique. The two countries managed to regain monetary sanity through their respective central banks.

He proposes a reconstitution of the RBZ  as in some Eastern European countries where Currency Boards were used in conjunction with the "unofficial" use of foreign currencies.