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THE continued growth of farm incomes requires more than just expanding production of existing crops, and boosting yields of many crops, but also more use of new crops, rare crops and more harvesting of the seed and fruit of many wild species, rather than developing monocultures chewing up the land.

This is becoming increasingly important as the harvests of many existing crops meet and exceed what Zimbabweans and their livestock need to eat, and we have to start looking at exports, and figuring out what we can sell, where we can sell it and perhaps most importantly what price other people will pay in markets we cannot control.

We have already started this expansion of our range of crops, starting with tobacco and cotton and now spreading into a far wider range of crops. 

Already the mapfura/marula processing plant at Rutenga has turned what might be considered a useful tree for firewood or charcoal into something that communities want to leave in the ground to produce money, from the fruit they sell to the processing plant, every year with remarkably little effort. 

There must be a wide variety of other similar fruits and seeds on indigenous trees that good research can find good products we can make from them.

There has been and is a serious effort to preserve our natural woodland and indigenous species, but this will be automatic when, like the mapfura, you convert local tree cover into sustainable sources of income year in and year out and communities guard them far better as money trees than any law can.

We are now starting to look at a plant that many thought grew far too well in this country, cannabis sativa or mbanje, and seeing if this cannot produce money legally and without risk of spreading any drug cultures. 

We have already changed our law to allow licenced growing of the variety that produces the main drug for medicinal purposes, the licence requirements being quite tough obviously so there is no leakage, but we probably need more research to expand the medicinal product range and help Zimbabwe become a large-scale and reliable supplier of quality products.

But the drug variety is only one of the half dozen or so cannabis varieties, the rest being industrial hemp which is grown largely for the fibre in the stem, the seeds which are useful for stockfeed, and certain medicinal chemicals. In these industrial varieties the mbanje content is tiny. 

The fibre has been used for thousands of years, in fact being one of the first fibres being used by mankind, and has a wide variety of uses: paper, cordage, rope, building panels especially when mixed with lime or cement, insulation, certain textiles and even biodegradable substitutes for several common plastics.

It has only recently become legal to grow. The colonialists banned it because of the confusion with the drug variety, and the ease with which a farmer could grow both. 

So the new legal farming of hemp has to be licenced, largely because the authorities need to know where it is being grown and who is growing it so that the drug variety cannot be hidden in the middle of an industrial hemp field.

This growth of hemp farming fits in rather well with another need of Zimbabwe, to convert our huge tobacco output into products made in Zimbabwe so tripling or better the value of our tobacco exports.

We are a major exporter of flue-cured tobaccos, although if we want to move towards exporting cigarettes, rolling tobaccos and pipe tobaccos, or even cigars, we are going to have to expand our range of varieties with more oriental tobaccos, fire cured and air cured tobaccos.

We will also have to start producing some of the other materials that go into a manufactured tobacco industry, such as the cigarette papers, and here industrial hemp, could find a ready local market if our industrialists and the tobacco industry are thinking.

Hemp-based papers are strong and fairly fine. So they are favoured for the better quality cigarettes and, incidentally, quality banknote paper has a significant percentage of hemp fibre since this means the paper tears less easily.

Hemp papers are liked by smokers since they are very thin, but still strong, and made of a natural fibre that leaves very little after-taste, all desirable qualities, that explain why France, the largest producer of cigarette paper in Europe is also the largest grower of hemp in Europe, 8 000 tonnes a year of that crop. 

French farmers are also rather good at maximising the income from farms that are roughly the size of our A1 farms, and will grow a wide variety of crops to keep the money flowing.

But the point is that if we are to become a major exporter of tobacco products, rather than tobacco leaves, we not only have to expand the flavour range of our output, with flue-cured as the solid base, but also start looking at the huge quantities of other products, such as premium cigarette papers and filters that we need, otherwise we return to the problem that we convert a lot of the extra export money into raw material imports, which partially defeats the purpose.

One huge advantage of hemp when it comes to the paper industry is the fact that it is an annual crop, in fact the growth is largely within a three-month season, and it is one of the top two or three fastest growing plants on the planet. 

So paper mills reliant on hemp do not have to wait 15 years for trees to grow nor have to chop down old growth trees. Processing of hemp for paper is less complex and damaging to the environment than converting trees. 

The processing is more expensive, largely because a decent mechanical way of separating thin and thick fibres has yet to be developed, but researchers can think about this.

With the Second Republic we are now becoming used to our farmers growing more than enough food. 

Some of this surplus can be processed locally and sold as processed products, but the profit margins on unprocessed grains in export markets are likely to be low and perhaps even chewed up with transport costs, so we need to be able to have a lot of other products to produce the profits that our farmers, especially in conjunction with our industrialists in processing industries, need to have a good life.

It is no longer food crops versus cash crops, but rather both using different types of land and together pushing the incomes for small-scale farmers as we continue moving swiftly towards ensuring that those couple of million families can reach the middle income levels and so drive Zimbabwe swiftly into prosperity we all want.