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Agricultural chaos
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2006-17
Monday April 24^th 2006- Sunday April 30^th 2006

THE government media continued to suffocate the source of the chaos besetting farming during the week.

For instance, none of the 57 stories the broadcaster carried on agriculture or the 35 reports the official papers featured on the matter explored the real causes of the problems bedevilling agriculture. Instead, the reports either simply highlighted in isolation the farmers’ concerns, or glossed over the deep-seated problems with the authorities’ positive comments on the situation.

Nothing more clearly summed up this professional dishonesty than their coverage of the crisis affecting tobacco farming. For example, ZBH merely highlighted the farmers’ complaints over the new tobacco pricing structure announced by the Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono, which scrapped the previously promised financial support incentives, without giving a coherent background to the standoff between the two.

Rather, Spot FM and ZTV (25/4, 6&8pm) simply quoted some farmers expressing their reservations over the new pricing structure saying it made tobacco farming "unprofitable".

But instead of fully exploring their concerns, the stations passively quoted Agriculture Minister Joseph Made masking the problems, claiming that the selling season got off to a "roaring" start as farmers were "all very happy" with the prices.

Likewise, The Herald and Chronicle (25/4) simply announced the new pricing system without analysing its full implications.

For instance, they hardly went beyond Gono’s claims that the policy shift, would "promote high quality leaf as well as incentives to tobacco growers to deliver their crop early". Neither would they wonder why tobacco quality had suddenly deteriorated in the aftermath of the land reforms.

Although the next day The Herald reported tobacco farmers threatening to pull out of tobacco production citing as "uneconomic" both "the price being offered for the "golden leaf" as well as the interbank exchange rate", the official papers’ subsequent reports merely defended the government’s new pricing policy.

The official media’s lopsided coverage of agriculture was reflected by their over-reliance on government voices as shown in Figs 1 and 2.

Fig 1 Voice sourcing in the official Press

Fig 2 Voice distribution on ZBH

Although ZBH carried more comments from farmers, they were merely quoted expressing their concerns without interpreting them as symptomatic of government’s failed agricultural policies.

Conversely, the private media generally ascribed the agricultural decline to government’s poor management, characterised by the continued haphazard farm occupations and poor technical support for farmers, among other factors.

For instance, The Standard (30/4) comment criticised government’s blockade of a planned crop assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organisation team, saying the exercise would have confirmed the "extent of the foods shortages despite the good rainfalls season and government’s claims of a bumper harvest."

The crop assessment, it said, would also have exposed government’s "much heralded land reform" as a "failure". Moreover, it dismissed the chiefs’ predictions of a maize bumper harvest (The Herald 24/4), saying it "was vague as it was shallow on statistical breakdown of district/provincial yields to shore up the claim of "good harvests".

Besides, the private media also carried several stories on the chaos characterizing tobacco selling season, which Studio 7 noted was not only destroying the sector but the economy too.

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