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ZIMBABWE:
Shortage of farm labour could impact on harvest
IRIN
News
January 05, 2006
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50958
HARARE - A shortage
of farm workers as a result of low wages could impact on this year's
harvest, warned the General Agricultural Plantation Workers' Union
of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ).
Despite heavy
rains for almost a month, new farmers have complained that besides
a scarcity of labour, shortages of fertiliser, fuel and seed could
lead to a poor harvest.
But new farmers
are underpaying their labourers, asserts GAPWUZ, which represents
up to 60,000 farm workers in the country. GAPWUZ secretary-general
Gertrude Hambira told IRIN that some members had turned to illegal
gold panning and informal trade.
"Quite
a large number of the new farmers are failing to pay government
sanctioned wages, and this is driving away farm workers. It has
to be remembered that farm workers buy from the same shops as other
citizens," she commented.
Some farmers
were paying monthly wages as low as US $6 against the required $20,
said Hambira. In the face of rising inflation, the union is currently
lobbying for at least $35 a month. Last month, inflation shot from
411 percent to 502.4 percent.
However, the
farmers have countered that they do not have the cash to pay the
required wages. Davidson Mugabe, president of the Zimbabwe Commercial
Farmers Union, said some new farmers were struggling to keep up
with payments, calling into question the viability of their plots.
"It has
to be borne in mind that ... the new farmers are just starting off
and they are also having problems to establish themselves. Some
of them are still waiting to receive their bank loans and this calls
for the need to re-adjust by both parties," said Mugabe.
According to
the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe, a government-funded consumer rights
watchdog, an average Zimbabwean family currently requires about
$200 a month to survive.
Under the Zimbabwean
government's fast-track land reform programme in 2000 most of Zimbabwe's
white commercial farmers, who owned 75 percent of productive land,
were removed from their farms to make way for landless blacks, who
had been crowded into overused land, mostly in communal areas, to
which they were moved during colonial rule.
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