By Steve Mapfumo
A first time visit to the Matabeleland provinces in the year 2003 was an exciting experience for me. The roads in Bulawayo looked quite wide and the city quite clean compared to where I was coming from.
As an agronomist, anything green quickly catches the eye but in the case of this region, there was not much to attract the attention of this agronomist.

They say that sometimes first impressions can be deceiving. Later on, I had an opportunity to visit the farms where my opinion about the region was dealt a heavy blow.

The man who took me to the farms was a certain liberation war veteran and ex-soldier who left the army to pursue agriculture in Matabeleland South province in an area called Ngwezi. Before we left, we met his daughter who back then was already driving a top of the range twin-cab and I learnt that she was in university and owned her own house in one of the flashiest suburbs of Bulawayo. The soldier turned farmer explained to me that all the money he was spending on his family was coming from a crop referred to as red gold.

Red gold
In most African societies in Zimbabwe, if one says that they are into farming, the crops that come into people’s minds are maize, sorghum, pearl millet, soya beans, wheat, tobacco and different types of livestock.

On the horticulture side, people are mostly used to onions, tomatoes, brassicas and peas. Not much is said about paprika. There is a time during which some local companies and also foreign ones really focused on paprika and during this time, there was some distortion of information on production costs and markets of the crop.

A visit to a farm in Matebeleland South opened my eyes and gave me a totally new perspective on agriculture in the dry province and also on paprika.

Then, the crop was being bought as pods or raw while in the capital there was an organisation that was processing the crop to get paprika oil or oleoresin. All the by-products from the extraction of oleoresin were also being sold. Nothing from this process was thrown away. Research has shown that processing the crop is more profitable than exporting raw paprika.

During the time when there was so much activity in the paprika industry, most of it was being grown under contract farming. The paprika companies were giving farmers all the inputs required to produce the crop, they were also sending their agronomists to teach farmers on how best to grow the crop.

On top of it all, they were also buying the crop from the farmers. What made it easier for the farmers was that the companies would send their buyers to all the areas in which paprika was being grown. This to some extent also reduced the risk of side marketing by the farmers. Many lives were improved by growing paprika.

Distortions
The involvement of local companies and the department of agriculture through AREX helped the farmers get the correct information on paprika production and also on the markets. The following are the distortions that were being preached by big paprika farmers:

In order to make money from paprika, a farmer needs to grow it on large pieces of land.

Paprika is an expensive crop to grow.

If a farmer does not have drying infrastructure on his farm, he should not grow paprika.

A farmer needs a very large labour force in order to properly manage the crop.

High grades can only be achieved through the use of large amounts of specialised fertilisers.

Observations
This information was being disseminated with malicious intent of course. The big farmers knew that the crop was fetching very good prices both on the domestic and international markets. They wanted to monopolise the industry, trying to control demand to manipulate even further the prices of the crop. By scaring away the small producers of the crop, they were able to create artificial shortages of the crop thereby giving them leverage to ask for better prices.

Local bargaining power
When local companies got involved and many small producers started getting involved in the production of the crop, many lives were changed for the better. Many children from rural farming households were sent to school including to universities. Even communal farmers started growing the crops and getting good quality and high yields. Agronomists taught the farmers how to grow the crop using few resources to an extent that they were almost getting a better return per dollar than the big producers. At one moment, one of the local companies reported that 80% of all the paprika they were processing was coming from the communal farmers. These communal farmers are still there today and may even be better equipped than then.

What then happened to paprika production?

Description and uses
Dried paprika, unlike other capsicums, is always a ground product before being used either for domestic culinary purposes or in the industrial preparation of processed foods. In Zimbabwe the commercial paprika crops were/are grown mainly for processing, to provide colourants for use in the foodstuffs industry, rather than a spice. For this reason, paprika is priced according to its colour intensity or colouring power. Colour content is always considered as the major indicator of quality and value when purchasing paprika or selling paprika product.

The most important paprika producers in the world are Spain, Hungary and the US. Zimbabwe made such a mark as a producer of high quality paprika in terms of colour units during the late 90s. Production however fell on the inception of the land reform programme but latter picked again from about 2002 till about 20006. The hyper inflationary environment affected both production and marketing of the crop. A good number of the buyers lost most of their business leading to them failing to buy the crop. Seed became too expensive because it was now being sold in foreign currency which was out of reach of the small scale farmers. Markets for the crop disappeared and farmers stopped growing the crop all together.

Potential
In today’s agro-situation in Zimbabwe, farmers are in a position to access inputs without facing many hurdles. Even though local paprika buyers have almost disappeared from the scene, the crop is still being bought in South Africa and even in some European countries. The accelerated growth of the human foodstuffs industry, in which numerous new products are being developed, has led to an increased interest in suitable food colourants. Health regulations are constantly reducing the number of synthetic colourants that are allowed in food. This of course has given rise to an increased interest in the use of natural colourants.

What this means is that paprika oil will always be in demand in the whole world meaning production of the crop can still give the farmer some meaningful returns. Even though the seed is not readily available in Zimbabwe at the moment, it can still be accessed from South Africa through a local company called Animal Farm Consultancy (Pvt)Ltd. This organisation can facilitate that local farmers get high quality hybrid paprika seed from Hygrotech South Africa. Hygrotech supplies very good seed whose F1 seed can still produce good yields.

  • Steve Mapfumo is the Head of Operations at the Zanu PF Youth League and Lasch Enterprises P/L Joint Venture. The Joint Venture Management can be contacted on 04-668773 or [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> . Website: www.laschjv.co.zw <http://www.laschjv.co.zw>

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