Online Reporter
The doubling of Zimbabwe’s agricultural production in just five years, from US$5.2 billion in 2020 to US$10,3 billion last year, shows that hard-working farmers are willing and able to pull out all the stops when Government policies back them.
The biggest winners in this remarkable growth are, of course, the farmers.
While there are Government agencies involved in farming, the overwhelming bulk of the work is done by millions of Zimbabwean farmers who have grown the crops we all need and reared the livestock we all require, along with a modest but growing contribution from fisheries.
Government policies and programmes have played an important part in enabling farmers to put in the very hard work that good farming requires, with the reasonable expectation that their efforts will be rewarded.
The five years saw one very bad drought and one long mid-season dry spell, but both Government and farmers have learned lessons on how to minimise damage and the critical importance of efficient and accessible irrigation.
Even in the 2024 drought, some crops, such as tobacco, achieved the second-highest harvest on record as farmers applied all the lessons they had learned.
Perhaps the most important deduction from the statistics is the fact that average production on each farm, from the smallest to the largest, has also roughly doubled.
We have not seen major changes in the make-up of our farming communities, largely because land is a finite resource and each farmer is expected to make the best use of what they have been allocated.
This implies that each farming household has seen its own production double, at least on average, with some doing better and some not so well, as is the norm with averages.
That, in turn, has seen farmer incomes rise significantly in the half-decade, despite the almost continual complaints that farmers around the world indulge in.
That growth in wealth from what farmers produce has seen many rural areas move ahead.
Small, old towns and business centres are growing again, sometimes very rapidly, and many other Zimbabweans are now making reasonable incomes in what used to be dismissed as “the rural areas”.
This non-farming rural population will continue to grow as innovative businesses go far beyond simply trying to sell things to farmers and start becoming their partners in post-harvest production.
In many parts of the world, farmers and agro-processors have formed tight networks that produce a wide range of essential and luxury goods, and we are now starting to see this in Zimbabwe.
This extra layer of value addition, sometimes on-farm, sometimes in the local community, is an essential move forward.
In some parts of the world, this complex value addition has seen the production of specialist processed food and drink, often using traditional methods, that can build near-global markets.
The old-fashioned idea that farmers grow a suitable grain crop, add in cotton and perhaps another oilseed, and keep a few cows and goats is being overtaken.
The Government is leading this transformation, helping farmers develop a wide range of income streams so that as Zimbabwe moves towards being an upper-middle-income economy, we are also an upper-middle-income society, where standards and quality of living for everyone are continuously improving.
The dramatic shifts in farming have seen farmers, for the first time ever, no longer holding a majority of the population, although they remain the largest single group.
The growing numbers of non-farming people in rural communities were inevitable as farmers became better at growing the crops needed and started to require all sorts of new services, from motor mechanics to solar installation specialists.
Government programmes to boost farmer production, and thus incomes, are not just based on good science; they are also very practical, working out ways a farmer can produce a decent harvest in times of climate change and how they can sharply reduce risks while increasing production.
Both are needed, as wild swings do not really help anyone.
Farming is unlikely to be the sort of totally stable business where every day is the same, but climate-proofing, sensible economic policies, good marketing, a willingness to explore an ever-wider range of crops and livestock types, plus producing the materials needed by other farmers, will make farming a very worthwhile career.
Investment into farming support is money well spent, so long as it is the right sort of investment.
Hence the Government policy of starting work on one or two new large dams each year, and backing these with irrigation infrastructure.
Some of the huge advances we have seen include the development of lower-risk and climate-proofed farming, such as Pfumvudza/Intwasa and now the livestock programmes.
The fact that farmers, given training, can produce means that the money spent on inputs supply and the like has been well spent. We still have some emergency food programmes in the very worst years, but generally economists have found it much more effective and less of a burden to pay farmers to produce what they and the rest of us need.
Despite modern gold prices and other surges in mineral value, agriculture has now re-established itself as possibly the top productive sector, and at the same time created a great deal of wealth for the very large percentage of Zimbabweans.
