Thu, 24 Aug 2017 13:07:49 +0000
By Bennie Mundando
THE Food Reserve Agency (FRA) insistency on maintaining the K60 maize market price clearly demonstrates how farmers are being swindled in the worst conceivable way, by a Government institution, the Zambia National Farmers’ Union (ZNFU) has said.
And ZNFU has again appealed to farmers never to sell a single grain of maize to the FRA but exercise patience and only sell to other buyers once the prices became profitable as doing so will be as good as offering their produce for free.
ZNFU president Jervis Zimba said the FRA was pegging the price of maize below the cost of production when it is supposed to balance the prices, both for mealie meal and maize production and charged that farmers that have supplied maize to the agency had done so at their own risk as it had proved to be a briefcase buyer and not a Government agency.
Mr. Zimba alleged that the FRA this year was not in the business to buy maize, but to swindle farmers and that all those farmers that had supplied maize to FRA were being swindled as the agency was not even paying cash for the maize. “We are aware that some farmers will be deceived with a few early payments, but farmers will only get paid after four or five months.
Therefore, FRA must not say they have started buying maize from farmers, when in actual sense they have started swindling farmers by paying them below production cost.
“We feel the pain as farmers outside the FISP bracket who grew the 2.2 million metric tonnes of maize using their own cash. We as a union feel the pain of the people who borrowed money to finance the production of this maize.
We feel the pain for those farmers who will fail to pay for the tractors and farm equipment loans. We also feel the pain for farmers who got fertilisers on credit from agro dealer companies, who will be unable to pay back these loans,” Mr. Zimba said.
