POWER outages have been fingered as the main reason why
Surface Wilmar in Chitungwiza has stopped cooking oil production.
Surface Wilmar manufactures Pure Drop cooking oil. Surface Chairman Somani Narotta told Deputy
Minister of Industry and Commerce Raj Modi yesterday that it was now four weeks
since they stopped production.
“For the past four weeks there has been no production due
to power shortages, employees work during the day and power supply has been
available during night hours making production impossible.
“Action has to be taken before it is too late and
industries might end up shutting down.
“We try using the little fuel we have to operate with
generators but fuel is very expensive, it is not possible to operate a large
scale factory with generators every day,” he said.
Dep Min Modi suggested that large factories should try to
use solar power as a long term solution to continuing of operations in the
event of sustain power outages.
“We will take the issue into account with other Ministries
and make sure that the Government supplies large factories with solar panels
for production to cut expenses.
“We need to help each other and work with other Ministries
and we will solve all the problems affecting production,” he said.
Narotta pleaded with Government asking for 100 000 hectares
of land to practice command agriculture.
“The Government should at least allow us to farm in
people’s land in order to recover our lost revenue.
“I believe that if we start command agriculture we will be
able to turn around the fortunes of the whole country’s economy within one
year.
“We have lost our winter crop because we can’t irrigate due
to power shortages which is a huge loss,” said Narotta. H Metro
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