What Is Really Driving the Cost of Your Chicken & Eggs.
Agricultural Markets Desk · 29 April 2026
The government raised the maize planning price by US$4 a tonne. That sounds small. But once you understand the currency gap, the import dependency, and the tangle of laws controlling who can buy and sell grain — you start to see why a US$4 adjustment can translate into a 12 percent jump in your bag of roller meal and creeping prices on everything from feed to eggs.
Walk into any supermarket in Harare or Bulawayo right now and the numbers hit you before you have even reached the freezer. Roller meal has climbed again. A tray of eggs costs more than it did six months ago. The frozen chicken section is quietly more expensive than last year. Most shoppers assume it is inflation, or the rains, or something that happened overseas. The truth is considerably closer to home — and considerably more fixable, if the political will existed to fix it.
It starts with maize. Zimbabwe’s government has proposed setting the Grain Marketing Board planning price at US$380 per metric tonne for the 2025/26 growing season, up from US$376. That US$4 rise — barely one percent — is the official story. The real story involves a currency that officially trades at one rate and practically trades at another, a country that cannot grow enough maize to feed itself and must spend half a billion dollars a year importing it, and a web of statutory instruments that make it illegal to buy grain outside of a single state-controlled channel. Put these pieces together and you get food prices that make no sense to the person staring at them in a shop — but make complete sense once you understand the system producing them.
The Currency Nobody Talks About
Zimbabwe now uses the ZiG — the Zimbabwe Gold — introduced in April 2024. The official rate as of April 2026 sits at around 25.4 ZiG per US dollar. But if you step outside the official system into the parallel market — where the overwhelming majority of everyday transactions actually take place — that same dollar costs you between 33 and 40 ZiG, depending on whether you are paying by transfer or in cash.
That gap — anywhere from 30 to 58 percent — is not a minor inconvenience. It is the invisible tax that sits on top of every imported commodity that Zimbabwe buys. When a miller needs to source foreign currency to pay for maize coming in from South Africa, they are not getting it at the official rate. They are getting it at something closer to the parallel rate. So a tonne of maize that officially costs US$385 to land in Zimbabwe effectively costs that miller US$450 to US$520 once the real cost of the currency they used to pay for it is factored in.
The ZiG launched at 13.56 per USD. It was devalued by 43 percent in September 2024 — less than six months after it was introduced. By mid-2025, annual ZiG inflation had hit 95.8 percent. Meanwhile Zimbabwe’s neighbours were dealing with inflation rates of 3 to 5 percent. The Reserve Bank spent more than US$400 million defending the ZiG in its first year alone. That instability translates directly and relentlessly into instability in food prices.
Zimbabwe Imports Half Its Maize — Every Year
Here is something the planning price conversation rarely acknowledges: Zimbabwe grows less maize than it needs, every single year. The national consumption requirement is around 2 million metric tonnes annually. In 2024/25, a reasonably good season, Zimbabwe produced 1.82 million tonnes — still short. The country spent around US$500 million importing roughly 947,000 tonnes in the ten months to November 2025. In the drought year of 2023/24, it was far worse: only 635,000 tonnes produced, 1.5 million tonnes imported, US$510 million out the door.
South Africa is Zimbabwe’s main supplier, sending over 900,000 tonnes in the twelve months to January 2025. Zimbabwe briefly banned South African maize imports in 2024 to protect local farmers, then quietly watched 34,000 tonnes come across the border in a single week in October. You cannot ban your way out of a structural food deficit.
The practical consequence is that Zimbabwe’s domestic planning price is not the floor — the South African import price is. When grain is tight in South Africa, as it was in 2024 following a poor harvest, regional prices spike and Zimbabwe pays more for every tonne it imports regardless of what any planning document says. The government’s own cost-plus model acknowledges this by using an import parity benchmark of US$385 per tonne as its ceiling reference. The planning price and the import price are now almost identical. That is not a comfortable place to be.
What This Does to Feed, Chicken, and Eggs
Maize is not just a staple food — it is the foundation of Zimbabwe’s entire poultry industry. A standard bag of broiler feed is roughly 60 to 70 percent maize by weight. When maize gets more expensive, feed gets more expensive, and within weeks that cost shows up in the price of live birds. Broilers are grown and sold in 35 to 42 day cycles, so new input costs hit farm gate prices fast. Every US$2 increase in the cost of a 50kg bag of broiler feed adds roughly 15 to 20 US cents to every kilogram of chicken that comes off a farm.
| Product | 2022/23 | 2023/24 | 2024/25 | 2025/26 (proj.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maize planning price ($/MT) | $350 | $365 | $376 | $380 |
| Import parity benchmark ($/MT) | ~$330 | ~$355 | ~$380 | ~$385 |
| ZiG parallel rate (per USD) | n/a | n/a | ~35–50 | ~33–40 |
| Maize imports (million MT) | ~0.38 | ~0.64 | ~1.50 | ~0.95 |
| Broiler feed 50kg ($/bag) | $22.00 | $24.50 | $26.00 | ~$28.00 |
| Live broiler ($/kg) | $2.80 | $3.10 | $3.40 | ~$3.70 |
| Eggs — 30 tray ($) | $3.80 | $4.20 | $4.80 | ~$5.20 |
| Roller meal 10kg ($/bag) | $5.50 | $6.00 | $6.70 | ~$7.50 |
Chicken contributes more than 60 percent of all meat consumed in Zimbabwe. It is not a luxury — it is the protein most ordinary families depend on. When the cost of producing it rises by 8 to 12 percent in a single season because maize got more expensive and the currency moved against importers, that hit lands hardest on the households that can least afford it.
The One Thing That Could Change Everything
Every analyst who looks at this system arrives at the same conclusion: the planning price mechanism is only as good as the government’s ability to pay farmers promptly, in meaningful currency, at a price that reflects actual production costs. When that happens — when farmers get their money quickly, in US dollars, at a fair price — they plant more the following season, deliver more through formal channels, and the whole system functions better. When it does not happen — when ZiG payments come late and the exchange rate has moved against the farmer in the meantime — farmers divert grain to private buyers, plant less next season, and the structural import dependency deepens.
A farmer owed US$380 per tonne who receives ZiG at the official rate of 25.4 ZiG per USD gets 9,652 ZiG. When they try to convert that to US dollars on the parallel market at 33 to 40 ZiG per USD, they walk away with US$241 to US$298. That is a shortfall of 21 to 37 percent before a single payment delay has elapsed. It is why farmers sell to private millers even when it is technically illegal. It is rational behaviour in an irrational system.
GMB chief executive Edson Badarai has reaffirmed the board’s commitment to supporting both national food security and farmer viability. “GMB is dedicated to maintaining a pivotal role in the agricultural stabilisation and transformation agenda,” he said. “This commitment is reflected in the strategic pricing aimed at supporting farmers and ensuring food security.” The commitment is clear. The delivery record is what the industry is watching.
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Also in this series:
The Monopoly That Won’t Die: How Zimbabwe’s Grain Laws Trap Farmers and Inflate Every Bag of Feed
Priced Out of the Region: What 40% Local Sourcing Will Cost Zimbabwe’s Chicken and Feed Sector
Sources: GMB; ZimStat; USDA FAS; FEWS NET; ZimRate (April 2026); Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe; Equity Axis; Cornell SC Johnson. Feed, broiler and egg prices are indicative commercial market estimates; actual prices vary by location and retailer.
