Decent Work Meets The Maize Price At Zimbabwe’s TNF Summit
By the time the microphones are switched on in Victoria Falls on 21 September, the talking points will be polished. Banners will promise “Inclusive Growth, Decent Work, Beneficiation and Investment Promotion”. President Emmerson Mnangagwa is expected to open the first Tripartite Negotiating Forum (TNF) Global Summit with a vision of shared prosperity.
Out in Norton, Mvurwi, Chiredzi, and the long stretches of maize between them, the numbers look rather different. Roughly one million people work on Zimbabwe’s farms. The lowest-paid among them now earn US$80 a month.
They are feeding the nation on barely more than half the national minimum wage. And the employers who hire them say they can no longer make the maths work.
What The TNF Can Decide – And What It Cannot
The TNF sits at the apex of Zimbabwe’s social dialogue. Government, organised business under the Employers’ Confederation of Zimbabwe (EMCOZ), and organised labour under the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) meet under its umbrella to bargain over the broad economic framework, including the national minimum wage.
It is an important table, but it is not the one where farm wages are set.
On the farms, pay packets are governed by the National Employment Council for the Agricultural Industry in Zimbabwe (NECAIZ). Employers and unions there bargain over sector-specific collective agreements: general agriculture, horticulture, sugarcane, and other subsectors each with their own minimums.
FFA Explainer:
The Tripartite Negotiating Forum brings together government, business, and labour to agree national-level economic and social policy. National Employment Councils like NECAIZ operate at industry level, setting wages and conditions for specific sectors. What the TNF decides sets the tone; what NECAIZ signs off determines what lands in a farmworker’s pocket.
The most recent agreement under NECAIZ’s general agriculture sector took effect on 1 June 2025. It lifted the lowest-graded farmworker’s wage from US$75 to US$80 a month, and the highest general grade from US$149 to US$159. Employers must pay 65 per cent in United States dollars and 35 per cent in Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG).
Horticulture’s minimum moved from US$94 to US$99. Sugarcane wages rose by eight per cent to US$148.
Set those figures against a national minimum wage of US$150, gazetted under Statutory Instrument 186 of 2024, and the gap is stark. While the country prepares to celebrate the principle of a wage floor at the TNF summit, agricultural labour still falls below it.
Farm Wages, Farm Gates, And A Squeezed Middle
Few in the sector pretend US$80 is enough to live on. Employers, though, insist that simply raising the figure without touching anything else would push many farms under.
“Farmers are caught between viability and workers’ welfare,” said George Seremwe, chairman of the Zimbabwe Tobacco Growers Association, reacting to the June settlement. “We must review output prices to sustain decent wages.”
Monica Chinamasa, president of the Zimbabwe National Farmers Union, called the wage schedule fair “considering the current cost of living” – language that acknowledges the twin pressures of rising household budgets and tight farm margins.
The problem, from the producer’s side, is that the key price signal is now moving against them.
For the 2025/26 marketing season, the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) pegged maize and traditional grains at US$364.75 per tonne. That is a 3,1 per cent cut from the previous season’s US$376.48, and the first downward revision since payments moved fully into US dollars in mid-2024.
Soya beans were set at US$583.01 per tonne; sunflower at US$670.46 per tonne.
Producer prices, unlike farm wages, are set by government rather than negotiated at the TNF. Yet they are the hinge on which the entire argument over “decent work” in agriculture now turns.
Decent Work Versus Decent Prices
The TNF summit arrives draped in the language of “inclusive growth” and “decent work”. For agriculture, those concepts collide in a basic equation: what comes in at the farm gate must cover wages, inputs, finance, and a margin for replanting and growth.
When the main buyer of maize – government, through the GMB – cuts the price per tonne, that equation becomes harder to solve.
On a small maize farm in Mashonaland West, the sums are painfully simple. A grower delivering 40 tonnes of maize will earn just under US$14,600 at the new GMB price. From that, they must pay labour, seed, fertiliser, diesel, repairs, transport, and loan repayments. There is little left to lift a general worker from US$80 closer to the US$150 national minimum, let alone to a level that reflects the true cost of life in 2025 Zimbabwe.
At the TNF summit, much will be said about productivity and competitiveness. For the farmworker in Kadoma or Mutare, those words boil down to a tougher question: how can they produce more, with more care and skill, when their own wage leaves their family hungry?
The Social Contract On Trial
Behind the speeches, the summit’s centrepiece is a document: a draft national Social Contract that TNF leaders say is at an advanced stage. They describe it as sitting on five pillars, intended to move Zimbabwe from confrontation to cooperation between the state, business, and labour.
TNF executive director Albert Nyakadzumbu has argued that the Victoria Falls gathering will help shape “practical policies and solutions that promote decent work, economic competitiveness, value addition, beneficiation, investment promotion, productivity and sustainable livelihoods”.
Each of those phrases has a concrete meaning in the fields.
- Decent work is not an abstract slogan; it is the difference between a worker being able to send a child to school or pulling them out to weed maize for extra income.
- Economic competitiveness can mean a maize farmer in Mhondoro competing with imported grain that arrives at prices local producers cannot match.
- Value addition and beneficiation are where hope lies for better returns – processing maize into stockfeed, mealie-meal, or starch instead of selling raw grain at a discount.
- Productivity suffers when a workforce is underfed, underpaid, and constantly looking for a better-paying job elsewhere.
- Sustainable livelihoods are the promise that an US$80 wage currently breaks.
FFA Explainer:
A social contract is a broad agreement between government, business, and labour on how to share the gains and burdens of the economy. It usually covers wages, prices, tax, and social protection. For farmers, its value depends on whether it physically changes the price per tonne and the wage per month – not just the speeches.
For agriculture, the social contract will only be credible if it tackles farm viability and farm wages as one problem. That means recognising that the wage table at NECAIZ and the producer price set by the Treasury and Agriculture Ministry are part of the same conversation, not separate files on separate desks.
Zimbabwe’s Policy Promises Meet The Field
On paper, Zimbabwe has already committed to many of the goals the TNF summit will celebrate. The National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1) speaks of “decent jobs” and higher productivity. The African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals call for zero hunger, reduced inequality, and decent work for all.
The farm is where those big frameworks either live or die.
A sugarcane cutter in the Lowveld earning US$148 a month is technically above the farming minimum but still below the country’s declared floor. A woman grading horticulture produce in Nyanga for US$99 a month is part of the export success story and the gender empowerment speeches, but her own food budget says something different.
Many farmworkers are women and young people. For them, “inclusive growth” is not a line in a communique. It is whether they can afford to stay in agriculture at all.
A Masvingo Snapshot: One Farm, Two Pressures
On the outskirts of Masvingo, a mixed farmer growing maize and soya beans for the GMB and local millers put it bluntly in conversation with FFA.
“If I push the wage to the national minimum without a change in producer prices, I must drop workers or drop hectares,” he said, asking not to be named to protect relations with his staff. “If I drop hectares, there is less maize. If I drop workers, the quality goes down. Where is the space?”
One of his general workers, a man in his thirties with three young children, earns just over the sector minimum after years of service. His wife sells vegetables by the roadside to top up their income.
“We are grateful to have a job, but the money goes quickly,” he said. “Uniforms, fees, rent, groceries – by the second week, it is finished. Decent work must mean decent pay.”
The exchange captures the TNF dilemma in a single farmyard: an employer caught between a state-set price and a moral obligation to pay better; a worker carrying the weight of “decent work” on a wage that will not stretch.
Linking The Farm Gate To The Payslip
If the TNF summit is to mean anything down on the farm, the social contract emerging from Victoria Falls will need to answer a simple test: does it connect what a farmer receives to what a worker is paid?
That could take several forms:
- Explicit recognition that wage negotiations in agriculture must be matched by predictable, timely, and fair producer prices for maize, soya, sunflower, and other staples.
- Mechanisms to review agricultural producer prices when sector wage floors rise, so viability and labour standards move together rather than in conflict.
- Support for value addition – from small-scale milling to oil pressing – so that more income is generated beyond the raw commodity sale.
- Clear timelines for payment by state buyers like the GMB, so farmers can plan wage payments without carrying excessive finance costs.
Without that link, “decent work” risks becoming a slogan that sits comfortably in a conference hall but does not survive the journey to a payslip in Shurugwi or Gokwe.
What To Watch From The Fields
The TNF Global Summit will bring more than 1,000 delegates from over 15 countries to Victoria Falls. Panels will dissect investment promotion, beneficiation, and sustainable livelihoods. International guests will share case studies.
For Zimbabwe’s farmers and farmworkers, the key indicators will be far more practical.
- Does the final social contract mention agriculture explicitly when it talks about decent work and price stability?
- Are producer prices for staple crops treated as part of the labour conversation, or left to separate announcements after the summit?
- Will NECAIZ and the agriculture unions be formally plugged into the TNF follow-up mechanisms?
- Is there any signal that future wage awards in agriculture will be matched by deliberate adjustments in farm-gate prices, especially for smallholders?
If the summit produces a social contract that binds these threads together – that treats the farm gate and the pay packet as one equation – it will have done something the TNF has struggled to do in more than two decades of dialogue.
If, instead, Victoria Falls yields warm declarations while leaving NECAIZ wage bargaining on one track and GMB pricing on another, the workers who grow Zimbabwe’s food will have watched a summit about “decent work” pass over their heads.
The answer will not be found in the length of the communique, but in a quieter place: whether, a year from now, the general worker who earns US$80 today can point to a payslip that reflects the cost of the food they help to produce.
Zimbabwe’s farms will be the clearest place to measure what the TNF Global Summit really delivered.
Farm Future Africa will report from the TNF Global Summit in Victoria Falls and track its resolutions for the agricultural sector, from the conference hall to the homestead.
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