The ManicaPost
Samuel Kadungure
Senior Reporter
FARMERS now have an option to sell their agricultural products through an online auction platform that serves as a one-stop market.
The online auction platform provides great advantages for a variety of businesses, including restaurants, retail farm markets, supermarkets, hospitals, universities, schools, and industry.
It brings together a wide variety of seasonal products from hundreds of farms – thereby creating a one-stop shop for traders and making sourcing from local farms easier as one doesn’t have to visit the farms.
The auction comes as an addition to the existing traditional trading where the prices are normally pre-determined and payment is not prompt or guaranteed.
With the auction, orders are posted continuously and matched at the end of the day with a clearing price.
The mechanics of the auction are designed to cater for voluminous buyers and sellers, and allows those with competing needs to bid, thereby allowing the farmer to get the best deal.
This is now possible, thanks to the Zimbabwe Mercantile Exchange (ZMX), which launched the Agricultural Commodities Auction which trades every Wednesday from 8am to 4pm.
ZMX started operating on June 21, with maize and soya beans on sale.
A tonne of maize went under the hammer for US$260. In Manicaland, the auction warehouses are at the 14 GMB depots.
According to the ZMX Trading Rules gazetted in Statutory Instrument 184 of 2021, ZMX serves two functions – warehousing receipt system and spot trading.
The auction will this season cover 12 crops, that is maize, soya bean, sunflower, sugar beans, rapoko, red and white sorghum, ground and round nuts, wheat, pearl millet and cowpeas.
Plans are afoot to broaden it to cover 49 commodities, including livestock and horticultural products.
ZMX trading and markets coordinator, Mr Dennis Chisevure said the start of the auction follows the registration of buyers, sellers, traders, contractors, and the issuance of warehouse receipts.
He said interested participants are required to register with both ZMX and the Agricultural Marketing Authority (AMA).
Once registered, farmers and contractors can deposit their commodity into ZMX certified warehouses and selected GMB depots and other private contractors, and receive warehouse receipts that will be used for trading.
“If farmers want to trade on the auction platform, they should be holders of a warehouse receipt.
“To get the warehouse receipt, farmers should first deliver their commodities for warehousing, grading, cleaning and weighing. We only auction commodities that are in the warehouse,” he said.
When the commodity is warehoused, the farmer has three options – either to store it in the warehouse while waiting for its value to surge; access to finance using the commodity as a collateral or spot trading.
Mr Chisevure said their system is fool-proof.
“A farmer cannot participate on our auction platform without a warehouse receipt. This means they cannot participate when they have not delivered the commodities for warehousing.
“In the same vein, a buyer cannot participate without registering and pre-funding their account. This is done to avoid the risk on non-payment or auctioning non-existing commodities. This is binding to all parties, and it is fair,” he said.
He said farmers are paid three days after trading.
