Times Of Swaziland: ‘THUMBS UP NMC’

‘THUMBS UP NMC’
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 BY SIBUSISO ZWANE on 26/06/2019 00:50:00


MATSAPHA - Continuous improvement! This is one of the phrases that can best
describe the good news which came with the National Maize Corporation’s (NMC)
takeover of government’s input subsidy programme and tractor hire services.
Following the takeover by NMC, agro-dealers revealed that agro business became
much easier. They revealed this yesterday during their meeting with NMC. The
meeting was held at Esibayeni Lodge and its aim was to collect feedback about
the previous farming season and prepare for the coming one.
During the meeting, NMC’s Marketing and Communications Manager Nokwanda
Dlamini said there were two major aspects which they wanted to focus on during
the upcoming farming season; improving accessibility and footprint, together
with farm input distribution.
She said in the previous season, they realised that the focus in terms of
accessibility was mainly in the Manzini Region. On that note, she said they were
working on improving their footprint geographically.
Reasonable
“We want to be within reasonable reach to every farmer,” she said.
NMC Chief Operations Officer Cyprian Lukhele said their aim was to have sites
which were closer to farmers such that they did not need to drive or hire
vehicles to collect farm inputs.
“We want to be within reach so that farmers can just push their wheelbarrows
to collects the inputs,” he said.
In terms of input distribution, the marketing and communications manager said as
NMC, they called upon all agro-dealers to make sure that they became one-stop
shops. She said the demand was that agro-dealers should comply with farmers’
choice.
“Famers should get everything they need from one agro-dealer as opposed to
seeing them being sent from pillar to post trying to get farm inputs from
different shops,” the marketing and communications manager said.
She emphasised that agro-dealers should have clearly defined farm inputs
packages and that it should consist everything their farmers requires.
On that note, Lukhelepleaded with the agro-dealers to charge reasonable prices.
In fact, he asked that they should lower their prices so that every farmer could
afford their produce.
Furthermore, Lukhele said agro-dealers should supply on time, have a clean track
record and have the ability to supply. He said once that was achieved, it would
be easy for the organisation to also pay them on time.
Transform
On another note, Lukhele said as per the Strategic Road map 2019-2023,
agro-dealers (big and small) should work together in order to transform
small-scale farmers into large scale farmers.
He said so far, emaSwati imports about 90 per cent of the food they eat. He said
if this could be done, the country could produce enough food to sustain itself,
which meant that it could be counted among countries that are food secure.