On the side of a dusty road leading to a major town in northern Zimbabwe, farm manager Charles Zimora oversees a red tractor tilling rows of dry and cracked soil under a blazing sun.[Special coverage]
Wearing a loose blue work-suit and a worn baseball cap, Zimora has the look that did not betray his three-decade experience of a good farmer.
In 1987, he set his foot in agriculture as a teen, learning from the white commercial farmers. Later, he worked on the Hunyani farm just outside the town of Chinoyi. Back then, it was managed by the Chinoyi University of Technology as an experiment field before being leased to a Chinese-Zimbabwean joint venture in 2011 to grow grains: maize, wheat, and soy beans.
Zimora was retained as the manager. Now, he oversees 32 permanent farm workers and dozens more part-timers, usually hired during the harvest season, on the farm with 800 hectares of arable land.
"It is much better for the Chinese to utilize the land," Zimora said. "They brought in machinery, farming inputs, pivot irrigation towers. During the university days, we could not till the whole hectares as we do now."
He said the farm now pays better, and definitely hires more than ever before. But what counts most is the injection of foreign capital to a sector where most local small-scale farmers, including experienced ones like Zimora, could not secure loans to farm on their own.
"Otherwise, we have no money to buy farming inputs and the facilities,"Zimora said.
LOOK EAST
As he talks, the tractor drives by. Its shinning "YTO" brand sign reveals that it is a popular Chinese-made model "Dongfanghong", the name which is well associated with Chairman Mao's revolution that led to the founding of People's Republic of China in 1949.
Zimbabwe's ties to China could date back to the 1960s when freedom fighters of Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) led by Robert Mugabe received arms and military training from China to battle with the apartheid regime of Rhodesia.
At its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe inherited Rhodesia's booming agriculture sector, crowned as the "bread basket of Africa." But the good days did not last forever. Following the government's land reform in early 2000s, the West withdrew funds, imposed sanctions, and the once successful white commercial farmers fled away from the landlocked south African country.
