The Sunday News
THE agriculture sector has been identified as one of the sectors with the biggest potential to create employment through production as its gestation period is shorter as compared to other sectors of the economy.
Matabeleland Chamber of Industry president Mr Busisa Moyo said agriculture presented a great opportunity as everyone could participate and results were evident in a short time as seasons were between six and nine months.
“This was the success behind the emergence of India. For mining, the gestation period is long but for agriculture the results show after a season and secondly everyone can participate. It is an open sector,” said Mr Moyo.
Mr Moyo said to achieve employment growth through production, there was a need to identify the products the country must remove from the list of imports and then focus on what needed to be done to achieve this.
“This will mean partnerships, alliances, investments and more factories which will employ people. This has worked in the cooking oil industry where we have seen all four cooking oil manufacturers receiving foreign investments and credit lines.
“Secondly, we look at beneficiation of minerals; this one takes a longer time in some instances but gas, gold, platinum and nickel all present opportunities for Zimbabwe and Sadc as a whole. We export raw unprocessed copper, steel, coal, chrome, platinum but we import cars made from those raw materials.
“We should push for this to change by manufacturing components for global assembly or local assembly with components from other parts of the world,” said Mr Moyo who is also the chief executive officer of United Refineries in Bulawayo.
He said to achieve employment growth through processing of raw materials for exports, there was a need to sort the country’s policies and under the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation, clarify an Industrial Policy Framework for Zimbabwe and act on it with both the private sector and Government as well as entrepreneurs and policy makers working towards the same goal.
“We can make significant strides and be an economy that is four times our GDP. It will take immense political will and focus and entrepreneurial depth to make sacrifices now for the economic turnaround, already we have made significant strides working with Government as CZI, but there is still much to be done,” he said.
Addressing delegates at a business conference at the recently held Zimbabwe International Trade Fair, Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa said to create jobs in the country, it was imperative to create industries to process products instead of exporting raw materials.
VP Mnangagwa said by exporting raw materials, the country was also exporting jobs.
Captains of industry agreed with the VPs sentiments and said the country had to look at value chains linked to primary production that were easy to value-add for consumption within the country and for export.
