Zimbabwe launches Zim Commodities Exchange

The government of Zimbabwe has officially launched the Zimbabwe Mercantile Exchange (ZMX), an agricultural commodities trading platform with automated electronic warehousing and receipting capabilities.

The ZMX was designed to curb warehousing and price discovery challenges relating to farmed commodities, which local farmers encounter in their operations. It seeks to deal with challenges encountered by farmers in the marketing of their agricultural produce, which include limited and often costly logistics, inappropriate or inadequate storage facilities. The problems resulted in farmers incurring significant post-harvest losses.

The trading platform is suitable for a number of farmed commodities including strategic grains, barley, coffee, groundnuts, macadamia nuts, millet, oats, pecan nuts, rapoko, rice, sorghum, sugar beans, tea, cow peas and round nuts.

Initiative partnership

The exchange initiative is a partnership between the Government and private sector participants that include Financial Securities Exchange (Finsec), a licensed securities exchange, TSL Limited, a publicly traded agro-industrial business and CBZ Holdings, a publicly traded financial services business among others.

“As you will recall, Government through the 2021 National Budget allocated US$500 000 equivalent as its capital contribution towards the establishment of the commodity exchange. This exchange will provide convenience and efficiency in the marketing of agricultural commodities and this will ensure enhanced profitability, access to markets, finance and credit for farmers,” said Minister Ncube.

“This Public Private Partnership initiative will support the seamless trading of agricultural commodities by all players, including the Government itself. The innovation whose operationalisation we are witnessing today will greatly assist in reducing these post-harvest losses thereby giving our small-scale farmers more value for their efforts,” he added.