Tobacco grower registrations rise 10% in Zimbabwe for 2027

The TIMB has registered 81,797 growers as at 15 October. Planned areas remain below those of the previous season.

By Aïcha Diallo · 18 October 2026 · 1 min read

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Tobacco seedlings in Malawi, 11 March 2019. Archive photo used for illustration, unrelated to the growers registered in Zimbabwe. Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Reduced and converted to WebP.

Zimbabwe had 81,797 registered tobacco growers for the 2027 marketing season as at 15 October, compared with 74,082 a year earlier, an increase of about 10%, according to data from the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) reported by Chronicle on Sunday, 18 October.

The figures cited by the newspaper, however, show a potential area of 85,025 hectares, compared with 94,582 hectares the previous season. This is a projection, not a survey of areas already planted.

This rise in registrations follows a fall in prices. In its report published on 9 October, the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association said that as at 22 September, the average sale price for 2026 had reached US$2.49 per kilogram, compared with US$3.32 at the same stage in 2025, a decline of 25%.

For the new season, irrigated transplanting had covered 10,597 hectares, the TIMB told Chronicle, against a target of 20,000 irrigated hectares.

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