Business Reporter
The 2026 Tobacco Selling Season kicked off Monday with the first bale fetching US$4,60 a kilogramme.
Auction floors now sell only around 5 percent of the crop, with the remainder going to contractors, whose floors open today.
However, the open‑market arrangement and the very high level of built‑in transparency on auction floors set prices throughout the industry.
As such, they remain a crucial part of the price‑discovery mechanism.
The contract system was critical during the initial transition from about 2 000 large estates producing most of the crop to tens of thousands of farmers — many with small and medium‑sized farms after land reform — along with communal growers now able to play their full role.
But this system required tight policing to ensure fairness to both farmers and contractors.
This oversight was provided by the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board, which, although it grows nothing, ensures all farmers, contractors and merchants are licenced, and is prepared — as it was this year — to expel those who fail to meet requirements or attempt to cheat.
There is general agreement that while contract farming will remain very important, there needs to be more self‑financed farmers, where growers will borrow at least some of their production costs.
An increase in self‑financing will raise the proportion of tobacco sold on the open auction floors, ensuring that a strong pool of independently priced leaf helps set fair prices across the contract sector so that grade‑for‑grade differences between merchants, contractors and auction floors remain minimal.
At the start of the tobacco revival, most financing came from outside Zimbabwe.
Now, however, 67 percent of funding is local — despite the much larger crop — meaning that more of the value produced remains in Zimbabwe.
