Zanu-PF, China and Rhodesian’s, Who Really Is Pimping Zimbabwe’s Tobacco Industry? Part 1
- 8 April, 2015As different media publications try to figure out who to blame for this years poor tobacco season in Zimbabwe, the usual suspects have already been lined up, fingered and readied for the firing squad; packaged into the usual mantra of the “Mugabe must go” narrative. Whether this narrative is true or false, is entirely up to you the reader to decide and above the pay grade of this article’s author. However understanding how the tobacco industry actually operates has still remained a mystery to the average Zimbabwean, basically who really benefits from Zimbabwean tobacco? Dummies Crash Course to Zimbabwe Tobacco, Why the big deal? For those uninitiated to Zimbabwe agriculture, our soils are considered very fertile and can grow almost anything you can think off, picture or visualize a high value agricultural commodity and we can probably grow it. Rhodesians have always understood this fact, and were therefore content living outside urban areas just for this reason alone. The knowledge of how a commodities market “realistically” worked in relation to benefiting a Rhodesian farmer, coupled to the fact that they had access to arable land developed over decades of development and subjugation, meant that Rhodesians knew how to work the global system to their advantage. Which brings me to the first myth circulating within the media which unfortunately many of us end up swallowing up as gospel, attributing our tobacco prices falling this year, due to an influx of new farmers producing …
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