The farmer has remained on the farm, wedded by both tradition and fear to primary grain production only. Fear to venture beyond production of primary agricultural commodities, into manufacturing, into value addition.
Even his or her sense of investment has hardly gone beyond buying new farm implements, and increasing his or her bank deposits.
That false circle of enchanted comfort within which the farmer circulates now has to be broken.
The fat deposits which he or she enjoys daily, forgetting the risks of money illusion, must now venture into new investment domains, preferably along agricultural value chains.
He or she must exit the traditional comfort zone as a primary producer, must migrate from the green countryside to venture into the grey and sooty zone of the industrial wheel and smoke. This is what has changed China, enabling it to move billions out of poverty through on-farm, rural industrialisation.
The Rhodesians did as much. Their politics were predicated on the farmer. Through a proposition called the Farmers’ Cooperative — now Farm and City — countryside capital formation and retailing efforts by white farmers found expression into towns and cities.
Initially, that countryside capital went towards factories in which farm implements were fabricated.
Capital from farming was harnessed to generate technology solutions which upgraded agriculture. With time, farm capital diversified into the manufacturing of basics for white Rhodesia, even breaking into the frontier of exports.
In the end, the Rhodesian farmer supplied raw materials to industrial propositions in which he was a shareholder, owner or both.
The farmer became the key beneficiary all the way through the agricultural value chain. That way, the structure of the economy transformed to agro-industry we talk about today.
We are not Rhodesians; we are Zimbabweans. Yet models have no totems or patents. Models go into the pool of human experience from which any and all can draw. Why haven’t we? We have taken a conscious decision as Government to qualitatively transform our countryside, principally our rural areas, where the majority of our people live. This is what the Policy of Devolution is about: namely to trigger and predicate economic activity in each province on resources and competitive edge which each province wields. We have gone further. We have intimated another sub-policy to buttress the main Devolution Policy. This is RURAL INDUSTRIALISATION.
By Rural Industrialisation, we simply mean starting or launching industrial activity in rural areas, based on factor endowments in each rural space. Those endowments become the definers and drivers of the industrial activity we envisage in any one area. Our objectives are multiple.
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