Zimbabwe is losing out on the gains associated with growing and using cotton for domestic purposes. The country uses 30 per cent of the cotton it grows and exports 70 per cent to textile industries dotted around the world. Since it does not process all its cotton and export the fabric and extract more value from its produce, it fails to exploit the competitive advantage in using the raw material domestically. Instead the fabric market is now dominated by imports particularly from China and Pakistan. Most retail shops are also largely packed with imported clothes. That means clothing companies are importing garments on a huge scale and rendering the textile industry redundant. Early this year uniform prices skyrocketed beyond the means of the majority of ordinary citizens owing to a deficiency created by an incapacitated textile industry.

Zimbabwe has the potential to restore its status as a major producer and supplier of textile products in Africa. There has been an improvement in cotton production lately but value chains are non-functional considering that the bulk of cotton processing companies are either under judicial management or court-directed reconstruction. The textile industry is now trying to harness the full benefits of the sector’s value chain.