Sugarcane out-grower farmers in Mazabuka have accused Illovo’s Zambia Sugar of setting buyer prices that are exploitative and need to be revised urgently if local farmers are to earn a meaningful return.
The mostly local out-grower farmers disclosed that the pricing of sugarcane is usually too low as the farmers only receive 50% of the turnover from the seasonal produce, meanwhile they have to cover the entire input costs which is leaving them with little to nothing in terms of profit.
Kaleya Smallholders Farmers Association which is a group of farmers who grow sugarcane as out-growers for Zambia Sugar Company said the price sharing mechanism needs to be reviewed as it disadvantages the out-grower farmers who have to bear more costs than what the mechanism entails.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with the Zambian Business Times – ZBT, one of the out-grower farmers representative, identified as Mr. Mwiinga, called on government to promote legislation that will compel promoting companies such as Zambia Sugar to exercise realistic price sharing mechanisms between small producers and multinationals.
He said government should employ deliberate policies that will enable the small scale producers and out-growers to be assisted to access title deeds for their production areas (cane fields) and provide some subsidies for pesticides and fertlisers.
Mwiinga said the production of sugarcane reduced by 42,500 metric tonnes in the 2019/2020 farming season. He said 252,000 metric tonnes of sugarcane was produced in the 2018/2019 farming season compared to the 210,000 metric tonnes that was harvested in the 2019/2020 farming season.
He said poor irrigation and water supply owing to excessive electricity load shedding and the Covid-19 restriction did not allow farmers to do field operations in big numbers which is the usual trend, this is what caused the reduction in production.
He also said that farmers face many challenges such as unavailability of title deeds for the area under production thereby incapacitating them when it comes to access to finances, pests such as aphids in the cane fields and increasing pricing of basal and top dressing blended fertiliser.
Mwiinga said farmers can increase production if they can have a guaranteed and sufficient irrigation water supply and normal cane field replanting intervals of atleast every 5 years. He said one of the mechanisms put in place to increase production is to plant new sugarcanes every after the already planted canes get old and once that is followed, production will increase adding that the application of fertilizer also needs to be consistent.
Mwiinga told ZBT that in instances where water supply is inadequate, it becomes a challenge as the sugarcane requires a lot of water and the farmers get their water from Kafue River through Zambia Sugar Company.
The need for monitoring out-growers conditions by the ministry of Agriculture have been echoed across the Agriculture value chain owing to some anchors who set exploitative prices that leave the local farmers with tight profit margins which make their expansion plans impossible.
