CANNABIS CULTURE – Zimbabwe has 145 000 registered tobacco farmers according to Meanwell Gudu, chief executive of the Zimbabwe Tobacco Industry Marketing Board. The country is one of the world´s most respected producers of Virginia leaf tobacco strain. Industry experts now predict a marked decline on Zimbabwe´s tobacco auction floors, and cannabis seems destined to be the future cash crop.
March and April are Zimbabwe´s annual tobacco selling season when thousands of growers bring the smoked leaf product to auction warehouses where dealers from China, Europe, or South Africa pay lavish US dollar prices and ship the product.
Tobacco prices this year are low despite the government begging tobacco merchants to play a fair game with farmers. A kilogram of tobacco is being bought at $4.20 compared to $4.30 in 2021. Heavy rains in January, a key month for the maturing crop, caused leaching and flooding ruin. The country´s central bank is giving tobacco farmers 75% of their earnings in US dollars. The rest is paid out in RTGS, a near-worthless domestic currency that depreciates weekly in comparison to the US dollar.
“I feel like crying,” says farmer Josphat Moyo on pumping $15 000 into cultivating tobacco and only realizing $12000 in sales. His consolation – cannabis contract growing startups that are seducing demoralized farmers in Zimbabwe to try cannabis which promises more lucrative returns.
Anti-tobacco sentiment
Zimbabwe´s future earnings on tobacco are not looking rosy as the global anti-tobacco sentiment picks pace abroad. Rich countries like New Zealand, which are end buyers of Zimbabwe´s tobacco, plan to ban the cigarette for future generations. In Switzerland, a key lucrative market, voters have approved a near-total ban on tobacco advertising in February. By 2030, global consumption of tobacco and its demand may slide by 15%, Gudu, the tobacco executive says.
“This is a global trend that´ll quicken and seriously damage Zimbabwe´s future tobacco money,” says Shamiso Mupara, an ecologist. “That farmers are eyeing cannabis as a detour is hardly surprising.”
Zimbabwe is already making impressive forays into cannabis and looking to detach itself from tobacco. Last year, the country made its first shipment of industrial hemp to the lucrative EU market. 30 tons were shipped to Switzerland says Zorodzai Maroveke, the founder of the Zimbabwe Industrial Hemp Trust. A further 20 tons are slated to sail for Switzerland too from Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwe Industrial Hemp Trust is working with the Zimbabwe Tobacco Marketing Board to transition the country from tobacco to cannabis. Cannabis players in Zimbabwe have swarmed land, greenhouses, and harvest sheds. Firms from as far as Canada and Netherlands (a country idolized for its laissez-faire to weed) are partnering with locals to plant acres of weed.
In one rural farming district called Guruve where tobacco cropping is popular, Canadian corporations have fenced thousands of hectares of prime land to cultivate cannabis.
“It´s a toss-up. Tobacco requires the burning of prime forest to dry it. Cannabis requires no such,” summed Mupara the ecologist and founder of Environmental Buddies Trust.
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