Agricultural finance: 1990-2004

The first and second agricultural revolutions in Zimbabwe were made possible by a vibrant agricultural financing sector (Chimedza, 1994). In chapter 14, Chimedza reviewed the historical aspects of agricultural financing. Agricultural formal lending peaked in 1986 when the Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) extended roughly 100,000 loans to smallholders but after that the number of loans fell sharply. This coincided with an increase in maize, cotton and sunflower production and an improvement in beef marketing in the smallholder sector. However, the slump in the provision of finance called for a number of reforms in the Agricultural Finance Corporation and the broadening of agricultural finance to include rural savings mobilization. Such policy proposals are now even more relevant given the escalation in the demand for agricultural finance following the land reform programme. In the period between the 2000 and 2003, the government was still focusing on the land redistribution exercise and so little attention was given to the financing of the agricultural sector except for some intermittent and unstructured grants channelled by government through the Grain Marketing Board and Agricultural and Rural Development Authority for these institutions to secure some agricultural inputs for farmers in the years 2001, 2002 and 2003.

A research paper on how agriculture was financed between 1990 up to 2004 in Zimbabwe.