Agri-Insight
Each day, produce markets bustle with energy and activity. Sounds of vendors calling out prices and customers bargaining for the best deals permeate the atmosphere.
Customers weave through the crowded aisles meticulously selecting ripe tomatoes, crisp lettuce and fresh potatoes, to name a few. And throughout the day, the market remains a vibrant hub of commerce and community, where the bounty of the land is celebrated and shared among all who partake in this bustling spectacle.
To the unsuspecting eye, all is well with what is happening throughout the day. It will only take the scrutiny of someone trying to understand how the farmer who usually arrives in the dead of the night to sell his produce at the break of day will fit perfectly into this jigsaw of commerce and later walk away with a sense of fulfilment.
Today, my offering will focus at the goings-on at the mass markets, with a special bias towards Mbare Musika where most of the farmers' heartbreaks happen yet they cannot stay away but come again and again. They have to do this to make sure they put something on the table for their families. For them, happiness is just but an occasional episode in the general drama of pain at this cutthroat business environment called Mbare Musika.
You will forgive me for being brutally honest in some of my synopses of the problems bedevilling our dear farmers at Mbare Musika. A good chunk of the problems is traceable back to the farmers themselves and the custodians of the market place while some of the challenges are not man-made but come from an unforgiving natural world that indiscriminately wallops everything in its path.
The current punishing heat has ushered in the problem of early ripening of crops thereby causing a glut of some products on the markets and boosting supplies but negatively affecting the prices and ultimately profitability. It is also the same heat that is sucking away the little moisture that had been lingering in the soil leaving some producers without water to continue business and creating shortages in the process.
This other day I was at Mbare Musika and eavesdropped a conversation between two vendors. They were discussing the ever-changing pricing landscape at the market, with one saying tomatoes were selling for between US$15 and US$20 a week earlier, but on this day they were going for between US$15 and US$25 a sandak, making it difficult for them to order in bulk and later sell at a profit. In general, the liquidity crunch currently characterising the economy makes it difficult for citizens to access these basic products while the situation is made worse by some people who do not accept the local currency, the ZiG, preferring the US dollar instead.
This prompted me to do a random check of prices of some products that were on offer. Potatoes, in particular, caught my attention with small charts selling at between US$2 and US$3, medium at US$5 and US$6, large at US$7 while the extra-large category was going for between US$7, 50 and US$8.
I approached some retail sellers who were moving around buying stuff for their stalls and asked them how the prices were and they both complained about the ever-changing scenario, which they confessed was making business very difficult.
It got me even more curious to understand the dynamics behind the situation and from my interaction with people from various walks of life after the Mbare visit I began to appreciate that the water shortages currently afflicting the country's arid regions and causing livestock deaths were not only limited to animals but were also impacting smallholder horticulture farming. In most cases they are the people who produce the bulk of the fresh produce that is sold at the mass markets.
Essentially, water shortages are forcing those with unreliable water supplies to close shop while those with wells or boreholes established in shallow water tables were also caught up in the problem. This means that production of crops like tomatoes will take the brunt of the shortages thereby creating shortages on the market, which are allowing those with reliable water supplies to take advantage of the yawning supply gap to fix atrociously high prices.
One factor that has always militated against farmers is their failure to read market trends and use them for guidance in whatever they do. It does not make sense for someone to produce a hectare of a crop that is required in very small quantities on the market especially if that individual has no proper storage facilities. Most of our farmers do not seem ready to let go of the habit of producing a crop just because a neighbour or somebody they know has done so and reaped lavish returns. There are no 'one size fits all' kind of scenarios in produce marketing given that there are always many different factors at play when a farmer produces a product and takes it to the market.
Just recently, I heard my good old friend Dr Charles Dhewa, known to many as Knowledge Transfer Africa chief executive officer, talking about some farmers from Karoi who are stuck with 20 000 tonnes of cabbage heads. They are failing to get a market for their product and the next thing is that the cabbages will be wasted. Of course, it is very painful to imagine the amount of capital, labour and time, to name a few things that were invested into the crop's production process. For now, those farmers are going through the harrowing experience of watching the produce going to waste.
I have also observed that matemba are currently in abundance on the market with many people selling them at different prices in different locations. Such products normally do not make much business sense to trade in as traders literally engage in a price battle that will eventually see some selling the product at give-away prices just to off-load it. The problem of one product flooding the market is not a new thing and seems to be continuing unabated year after year. What is worrisome is the fact that in the end, the farmers or in some cases vendors selling the product end up more impoverished than they were before venturing into the business.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
I will sign off by wading into another issue that many may see as trivial but may make business sense if done professionally and with proper guidance - trading in locally available wild fruits. In most cases it is people from the communal areas that gather these fruits and sell them to markets in towns sometimes at ridiculously low prices. To them the argument is that they have nothing to lose and no losses to off-set in most cases but for every trading process to make sense there should be some business acumen involved.
Remember we have a lot of friends and relatives living outside the country and sometimes they would die to get a taste of the wild fruits they grew up enjoying, so, why not tap into those markets and get that much-needed extra income at very minimal costs. It only takes the aggregation of produce and following the proper export processes before money starts flowing into people's pockets.
