For years, smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe have faced a stubborn conundrum: how to get their produce to the market.

Transport has remained a pain in the neck for thousands, frustrating producers of anything from perishable vegetables to grain and livestock.

Farmers in rural districts that lie beyond Bulawayo’s city limits and run thriving horticulture projects routinely literally count their losses after produce fails to get to the market on time.

Truckers complain of poor roads, high fuel costs and fatigue as reasons why they do not make regular trips to farming communities despite the existing opportunities and ever-present need for their services.

Over painfully bumpy dust roads, truck and pick-up drivers dance on their seats as they firmly grip steering wheels, with the vehicles in constant danger of tipping over without notice.

Amid such dispiriting circumstances, transporters simply stay away from the merciless bumpy rides.

It is a palpable loss for both farmers and transporters.

While the economic impact on the sector has not been adequately quantified, it is part of larger challenges faced by Zimbabwe’s agriculture.

At a rural outpost in Lupane, a little over 150 km from Bulawayo, a group of women stand by the roadside waiting for a T-35 truck that carries on its loading bay desperate long-distance travellers alongside mounds of vegetables.

The women say they wait here once a week to receive greens such as tomatoes, onions, cabbages and kale.

The produce is grown in one of the few irrigation projects buried deep in one of Lupane’s villages.

“If the truck takes long to come here, we get veggies that are no longer fresh,” said Silibaziso Bhebhe, one of the women collecting vegetables from the truck.

A small scramble ensues as the women jostle to get their stock which they say is for both resale and their own domestic consumption.

They pay the driver a small honorarium, and in the rural community esprit de corps, the trucker-who runs a rural store-sees this as his own form of corporate responsibility.

Because of concerns of the perishables going bad, the rural women make dried vegetables out of necessity, a sign of the hidden impact transport blues are having on rural communities.

By their own admission, the women would rather have their vegetable fresh.

Yet according to the truck driver, some of the vegetables go as far as Lupane town centre, a further 30 km away.

At the town centre which serves as the sleepy provincial capital, more female vendors are waiting to collect the vegetables, many hours after the produce was harvested, inevitably compromising the perishables.

“Business is there to transport agriculture produce. It is the distance that is a problem as you can see,” the driver told me.

And by his telling, he is the only transporter who makes such regular trips, only because there are always hitchhikers and long-distance travellers looking to reach Lupane centre.

He transports vegetables by default when elsewhere a dedicated refrigerated truck would do the job, exposing the challenges faced by producers buried deep in different parts of rural Zimbabwe.

The government has always maintained that efforts are constantly being made to ensure logistics such as transport do not jeopardise activities in the agriculture sector.

However, the country’s legendary poor rural roads have only served to discourage transporters from tapping into what could be a lucrative industry.

“These are dusty roads and they become impossible to navigate during the rainy season,” the veggies transporter said, and this is a situation that replays itself across the country.

And this means investing in the maintenance of his truck which eats into the little he earns from transporting people and vegetables, he said.

Agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) say transport remains one of the major issues African governments must address to support smallholders.

Smallholder farmers produce the bulk of Zimbabwe’s food-up to 70 percent are based in the rural areas according to agriculture ministry data, and bottlenecks and interruptions in bringing produce to the market could point to logistical challenges that have not been fully addressed.

While government has committed to lay thousands of kilometers of road across the country, rural-based food producers are still struggling with how perishables can reach the market ahead of their best before date.