47 rates, lack of foreign currency for raw material imports, government instituted non-viable prices, electrical power cuts and limited rail capacity, all contributed to low capacity utilisation of input producing firms, leading to shortages. Input shortages, coupled with defective parastatal input allocative processes, resulted in leakage of inputs to parallel markets where prices have been unaffordable to poorly resourced farmers. The supply of seeds has been limited by acquisition of seed producing farms which has largely not been balanced by development of new capacity from within the newly resettled sector. In addition, newly resettled areas are generally under-served by private input dealerships, having to incur huge transaction costs to acquire inputs. Limitations in agricultural machinery The majority of land reform beneficiaries lack adequate machinery and draught power and do not have sufficient resources to acquire these in the short-term. Public equipment and draught hire services are under capitalised to fill the gap while private hire services have been slow in developing, due to a lack of technical and financial resources. Output Marketing A number of output marketing constraints severely limit the recovery of the agricultural sector. Grain marketing controls, and government fixed prices combined with late payment by the GMB in a highly inflationary environment, have severely reduced realisations by grain producers. Exportable crop producers also experienced low returns as a result of indirect taxing of products through exchange rate overvaluation, as well as from export bans on oilseeds which cut off the positive influence of international prices. Poor commercialisation of the communal cattle herd severely limits market opportunities at a time when the commercial beef cattle herd has gone down due to farm acquisitions. The situation is compounded by a generally slow development of output market outlets closer to the newly resettled farms. Technology Generation and Transfer The state of agricultural advisory services is currently limiting in its support of the transformed agricultural sector. A significant number of reform beneficiaries do not have adequate farming skills. The reforms have created an expansion of the grower base not matched by expansion of extension support. This has led, in some cases, to diversion of extension personnel from communal areas, where the need is great, to newly resettled areas. Currently, the scope for self-provisioning of knowledge services, as practiced by the large-scale commercial farmers in the past, is rather limited. In addition, the changed scales of production necessitated by farm subdivisions have made some production processes uneconomic, necessitating moving to more intensive production processes, the skills which are underdeveloped in the public agricultural knowledge services.