WHILE Zimbabwe's export earnings are surging, with an almost 18 percent jump last month, led by the dramatic multiplication in mining over the last year of the Second Republic, our imports are also rising.
Admittedly last month's jump of 20,2 percent in imports was exceptional, in being over the incredible jump in exports, partly because some major import items do surge at this time of the year.
We need to start bringing in the feedstock for many fertilisers so we have everything ready on time for the farmers; there is still that overlarge gap in oil seed needs and just before the next harvest, needs the largest imports to fill the gap and we fairly obviously had some importers simply playing the foreign exchange markets to build up stocks of raw materials beyond good business sense.
But one of our main problems, as the surge in imports of chemicals for fertilisers shows, and the fact that Zimbabwean standards of living are rising and so more people want to buy more cooking oil and other consumer goods, a lot of our expansion in several sectors where "Zimbabwe makes it" rests on a surprising inflow of imports so we can make it.
This accentuates the gaps that we have in our industrial sector, that bit between a lot of our raw materials which we do mine and do grow, and the consumer-industries where our manufacturers do manage to make or at least pack up to 80 percent of the goods on our shelves.
The bit we tend to miss is the heavy industry.
This is being sorted out to a large degree at the moment, and more sorting out can be done as we continue to develop things like our coal-bed methane, the natural gas in the Muzarabani area, the huge steel industry being created in the Midlands as Dinson Iron and Steel gets ready to commission the first phase of the Manhize steelworks and the complete rebuild of the closed Zisco works in Redcliff starts to take the first steps.
We now have Zimplats committed to building a sulphuric acid plant in Zimbabwe, partly because they want the product themselves for pushing forward their own value addition, and partly because there is a large and growing market for this basic industrial chemical, at the moment from the fertiliser industry but with others likely to need supplies.
Many economists in the First World tend to sneer at the metal-bashing, chemical and other traditional heavy industries, and there is probably, to give them their due, little scope for expansion in those countries.
Even China, the most rapidly industrialising country in history, is now concentrating much its new industrial growth and investment in higher industrial tiers.
But it must also be noted that the industrialised world is not closing down its heavy industry, or producing less steel or less chemicals or less fertilisers or less of the other major industrial basics, although there might be some shifting of production between countries.
They still need a lot of these primary products; all that their economies are doing is expanding in the secondary, tertiary and especially the service sectors far faster than in the primary industrial base.
However, the Zimbabwe economy has been largely unbalanced in recent decades, concentrating very hard on consumer products and services without much backing in primary industries.
We have been filling some gaps. Our farmers now produce all our grain, a far higher percentage of our oil seed, almost all our meat and a growing percentage of our dairy products.
We obviously need to keep the expansion pressure on oil seed and dairy, but at least the local percentage is rising.
This does require more fertiliser, as the general agricultural expansion does, and that means we need to build the sectors in mining and manufacturing that produce the raw materials for fertiliser.
Our phosphate mines are now back in full production and expanding, so one component is more locally available although apparently needs sulphuric acid for processing some products, another gap being filled.
Nitrogen fertilisers were once largely made locally, when some significant innovative thought at the time combined our then surplus of electricity at very low marginal costs, this being Kariba South surplus where there are zero fuel costs, with unusual industrial processes to liquefy air to extract nitrogen and electrolyse water to extract hydrogen and combine the two to make ammonia.
Unfortunately cheap surplus power became unavailable and so the more usual processes are needed, and that at the moment requires imported materials although once the miners are producing coal-bed methane in Matabeleland or are extracting natural gas, again largely methane, in Muzarabani, ammonia can be made from local materials.
Fertiliser in fact will lead the creation and growth of a chemical industry.
We used to spin and weave a fair percentage of our cotton in Chegutu and Kadoma; in fact those centres grew on cotton. Lack of interest by the prime investor for replacement machinery, coupled with other problems closed down this processing for all practical purposes.
The next level up, the factories making most of our work clothes, school uniforms and ranges of some high-quality clothing remained open, but importing the fabric. Which seems daft.
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That again is changing with one of our more dedicated investors under the Second Republic already bringing in the machinery to re-equip the factories.
That same investor is keen on an integrated primary industry based on cotton since he already feeds cotton-seed into his cooking oil factories.
Steel remains the queen of the metal bashing industry. Even in its heyday, Zisco produced a very limited range of primary products, never having for example a rolling mill to produce sheet.
The new Disco works at Manhize-Mvuma is not only using the modern continuous process steel making, which took over from the old batch processing in recent decades, but is also planning on producing a wide range of basic steel products, and will be producing rod and sheet as well as ingots, so a whole new heavy industrial base can be created.
When investment plans into Zisco are finalised these will require a complete rebuild of that steelworks, both in technology and product.
When we look at our imports, food is shrinking as our farmers do their stuff, but a lot of the expansion is in the intermediate products and basic products our industrialists need, and hence here is the pressure for major investment, major growth and major expansion so that we have a more balanced, and perhaps more traditional industrial base.
