• GMB still owe farmers ZiG 81.424 million and USD 7.419 million on 2025/2026 summer crop deliveries
• Settlement rates stand at 62.4% for the ZiG leg and 72.4% for the dollar leg, with arrears having rebuilt after earlier near-full clearance of dollar obligations by May 2026
•  ARDA accounted for 89.95% of GMB intake, indicating limited participation by private and communal growers

Harare- The Grain Marketing Board's unpaid balance to farmers on 2025/2026 summer crop deliveries stood at ZiG 81.424 million and USD 7.419 million  by 20 July 2026, against payments already made of ZiG 135,179,969.79 and USD 19,482,652.48, bringing total recognised obligations for the season to ZiG 216.604 million and USD 26.902 million, of which 62.4% of the local currency leg and 72.4% of the dollar leg have been settled.

At the interbank rate of ZiG 26.6967 per dollar as at 22 July 2026, the ZiG arrear of ZiG 81.424 million converts to approximately USD 3.05 million, bringing the combined outstanding balance to approximately USD 10.47 million, and the board has paid a little over two-thirds of what it owes on a crop it is still receiving.

Both settlement ratios represent ground lost from an earlier position. On 24 April the board had cleared 88.26% of its dollar obligations and 82.73% of its ZiG obligations on the prior crop, leaving USD 4.3 million and ZiG 61.8 million outstanding. Treasury then released USD 4.31 million against 2025 wheat deliveries and USD 0.944 million against summer cereals received from April, taking the dollar column to zero by 20 May. Eight weeks later the dollar balance has rebuilt to USD 7.419 million from nothing, and the ZiG balance sits 31.8% above the April figure.

The eighth Post-Cabinet Press Briefing in March recorded ZiG 90 million and USD 4.1 million outstanding on clearance rates of 74.8% and 88.8%. Balances compress when Treasury disburses and expand again as deliveries land. What has changed is the benchmark against which the pattern is measured. The Agriculture Food Systems and Rural Transformation Strategy 2 commits GMB to settling deliveries within 30 days of receipt. An unpaid share of 37.6% on the ZiG leg and 27.6% on the dollar leg, against a marketing season that opened in April, sits a long way outside that window.

The currency split is where the commercial damage concentrates. The ZiG leg is 10.0 percentage points further behind than the dollar leg, and it is the leg that carries the depreciation and inflation exposure while it waits. At a policy rate of 30%, a farmer holding an unpaid ZiG balance for three months forgoes roughly 7.5% in carry before any exchange rate movement is counted. A farmer holding a dollar receivable loses only the time value of money. Where growers can choose their buyer, and structured market liberalisation is explicitly listed among the Second Republic's agricultural interventions, that asymmetry pushes tonnage away from GMB and toward contractors and the Zimbabwe Mercantile Exchange.

The delivery mix explains why the arrear is small in aggregate and heavy in distribution. GMB intake is 139% above last year and ARDA accounts for 89.95% of it. Contract growers, self-financed commercial farmers, and communal deliveries that the strategic reserve was designed to aggregate supplied 10.05%. Run that forward, if total intake is 2.39 times last season and ARDA holds 89.95% of it, non-ARDA volumes amount to approximately 24% of last season's entire intake. The headline growth number describes a state agency delivering to a state buyer, and the private and communal growers whose participation the strategic reserve architecture requires are not returning to GMB in the volumes the delivery statistics imply.

The strategic grain reserve now holds 227,338 tonnes of maize, traditional grains, and wheat, up from 169,946 tonnes on 17 June and 166,894 tonnes in late March, a gain of 33.8% in five weeks. Against national maize production of 2,685,021 tonnes for the 2025/2026 season, the reserve is equivalent to 8.5% of the maize crop. The 2026 National Budget targets a reserve of approximately 500,000 tonnes and more than 1.5 million tonnes over the medium term.

Closing the first gap requires GMB to buy roughly 273,000 further tonnes at a moment when it cannot clear USD 10.47 million in existing combined obligations. Maize area rose from 1,813,974 hectares to 1,963,292 hectares, up 8.23%, while output moved from 1.8 tonnes to 2,68 tonnes with yield improving. Half the production increase came from additional land and half from better use of existing land, and the second half is the more durable.

The one part of the operation working on commercial terms is storage. GMB holds 70,015.011 tonnes of third-party grain following completion of the AI-powered silos, up from 68,979.6 tonnes on 20 May, representing 23.5% of the 297,353 tonnes now sitting under GMB roofs, against installed silo capacity of 862,000 tonnes with a further 672,000 tonnes under construction. Storage earns fee income without requiring the board to fund a purchase, and it is the only line of the business that does not create an arrear.

Meanwhile, winter wheat plantings stood at 106% of the 125,000 hectare target, roughly 132,500 hectares, against a pre-planting producer price of USD 524.56 per tonne and projected output of 662,500 tonnes. On the government's own projection, the crop carries approximately USD 347.5 million of producer value, and on 697,000 tonnes at the actual planted area it carries USD 365.6 million.

GMB will take only part of that, with contractors funding the balance under the 90,040 hectares placed under contract arrangements earlier in the season.

The 2025 crop of 642,000 tonnes nonetheless generated cumulative GMB wheat payments of ZiG 250 million and USD 30 million by 1 March 2026, and the board still owed farmers ZiG 81.424 million and USD 7.419 million on summer deliveries as at 21 July 2026. Wheat intake begins in September into a payments queue that has not cleared. Until private lenders carry the crop, every record harvest enlarges the government's payment obligation in direct proportion to its success, and bankable title is the mechanism that would move wheat financing from Treasury to commercial balance sheets and take the arrears problem out of the state accounts.

Three watchpoints define the next 30 to 90 days. The first is whether the dollar balance is taken back to zero before wheat deliveries begin in September, which tests whether Treasury releases are matched to the delivery calendar or to reporting dates. The second is the ARDA share of intake, currently 89.95%, where any reading below 85% would show private and communal growers returning to GMB rather than routing through contractors and the Zimbabwe Mercantile Exchange. The third is the ZiG leg as a share of total obligations, currently 62.4% settled, where a reading below 60% by the close of the wheat intake would confirm the local currency column is being used as the residual payment mechanism whose farmers bear the currency risk that the dollar column's faster settlement rate confirms they are already trying to avoid.