Episode 4: Global Lessons, Zimbabwean Solutions

In our last episode, we walked the ground with three farmers — Evelyn, Tawanda, and my citrus neighbour — and saw that their paths forward are all impeded by an overarching threat of economic and policy uncertainty.

So, how do we dismantle these barriers?

My Nuffield Scholarship gave me a priceless opportunity to step outside Zimbabwe and look at how farmers in countries like Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, Canada, and Kenya are solving their own complex problems. The goal wasn’t to import foreign models wholesale, but to find universal truths — principles that can be tailored for our unique Zimbabwean context. The way forward does not lie in identifying entirely new solutions, but in executing well-understood ones with urgency, credibility, and scale.

In this episode, I explore two of the biggest strategic dilemmas facing Zimbabwean agriculture: the future of labour and the unavoidable reality of climate change.

The Labour Paradox: Risk or Advantage?

The issue of labour in African agriculture is one of the first great dilemmas I discovered on my Nuffield travels. Low-cost labour, coupled with a large, growing and youthful population, can be seen as one of Africa’s key competitive advantages. But is it really? I came to realise it is likely both a competitive advantage and a strategic risk. Let me explain.

In Zimbabwe, the minimum monthly wage for a farm labourer in the horticulture sector is around US$99. Compare that to an equivalent casual farm worker in Australia, who earns approximately US$3,500 per month. It’s for this reason that in Australia, farmers prioritise technology and large machinery to improve productivity and reduce labour costs wherever possible. In Zimbabwe, however, with labour costs low, the commercial reality is almost the direct opposite, whereby it is more profitable to maintain a large labour force with lower levels of mechanisation and technology adoption. Coupled with challenges accessing finance and economic uncertainty, much of farming in the country is driven by manpower instead of machines.

I saw this dichotomy of labour costs play out in two different ways in Kenya. I visited an Australian farmer who ran a successful 1,100-hectare broadacre cropping farm with just seven staff, relying heavily on machinery and paying them professional salaries. These seven Kenyan staff had become role models in their communities. Some were going to university — something they would never have dreamt of if they were working as standard farm labourers on another farm. Others were taking what they had learned and were applying it on their own smaller plots — using improved fertilisers, investing in tractors and machinery, and employing family and friends to run their operations. This farm owner was so invested in his staff that he had developed remuneration models that offered his staff equity in his business. It was a radically different approach.

In contrast, I visited a large, publicly listed farming operation a few hours out of Nairobi that employed over 3,500 people. Chatting with their Managing Director, he spoke about actively resisting automation and mechanisation to avoid laying off their loyal and long-term workforce. While this is understandable and compassionate in the short term, it poses a strategic risk. It keeps a huge number of people in low-wage, low-productivity systems.

It was at this time that I was in Kenya that protests were taking place across the country — one of their demands to the government being a future with decent jobs and the opportunity for prosperity. These are the very youth that, under low-technology and manual farming approaches, would be expected to go and work for a minimum wage to keep the farming sector going. It’s perhaps no surprise that African youth see farming as a “last resort” option that is low-status and low-return. They rather aspire towards waged non-farm jobs.

The dilemma is critical: if new technology becomes so effective and affordable in developed markets that it is more efficient than cheap labour, African farms and companies that resist change will be locked into old, less competitive ways of doing things. This is a long-term vulnerability.

The implication for Zimbabwe

For Zimbabwe, the path is clear: we must pursue a transition from a high-labour, low-wage model to a professional, high-skill, market-driven one. We need to ensure that our agricultural progress leads to a better-paid, professional workforce, not one trapped in poverty.

While adopting a “lean” workforce model driven by high technology can breed resentment in the context of high unemployment, maintaining low-productivity, labour-intensive models may inadvertently entrench poverty for a large proportion of the population. We need a balanced approach that promotes ongoing innovation and investment in technology to grow productivity and global competitiveness.

Climate change is already here

Now let’s turn to the existential threat that climate change poses for Zimbabwe.

The impacts of climate change are not unique to Zimbabwe, and were evident in every country I visited on my Nuffield travels, not as a future concern, but as a reality here and now.

In Brazil, I visited a range of horticultural producers in Rio Grande do Sul. One company had invested in netting — at a great economic cost — to cover 60% of their 1,100 hectares of apple orchards to protect them from hail, an occurrence that was largely unheard of in the past. They also spoke about yields being reduced by over 55% in 2023 as a result of excessive rainfall. Two months after my visit in March 2024, I watched with concern the news headlines that the same area had just experienced its worst flooding in 80 years, with 39 people dead. I can only assume that yields were significantly impacted by heavy rains for their second consecutive year.

In New Zealand, I drove through the Eden Valley looking at field after field of previous vineyards and apple orchards that were now entirely covered in deep silt. It was the result of a cyclone almost 18 months earlier, as well as poor catchment management. In Nova Scotia on Canada’s east coast, vineyards and apple orchards were still recovering from a polar vortex in 2023 that had wiped out their crops.

Climate change had several industries on the brink. A 60-plus-year-old maple farmer in Nova Scotia conceded that the industry in the state would become non-viable in his lifetime, while a Nova Scotian lobster fisherman spoke about warmer waters already making fishery areas non-viable and driving the local industry to the brink of collapse.

Climate change in many areas is driving a shift in growing regions for various agricultural products. In New Zealand, kiwifruit has typically been grown on the North Island in the Bay of Plenty, but this is shifting as temperatures rise and kiwifruit production becomes viable further south. Similarly in Nova Scotia, a strong wine industry is emerging as warming temperatures combine with the development of hybrid cold-tolerant grape varieties.

The solutions I saw pointed to one word: resilience. For some, resilience meant building a sufficient financial buffer during the good times. For others, it meant reducing risks by spreading exposure: growing more than one crop, staggering maturities, and selling to multiple markets. It was about adaptive management, using climate triggers to guide key farming decisions.

The implication for Zimbabwe

This isn’t a future problem; it’s a current crisis. The 2024 agricultural season, for instance, was devastated by El Niño. Over 80% of Zimbabwe received below-average rainfall, leading to a national disaster declaration and a catastrophic 60% plummet in maize production. This is the new normal. Scientists warn that climate change could reduce overall crop yields in southern Africa by as much as 60% in the coming decades.

The majority of our farmers are highly vulnerable because they depend entirely on rain-fed agriculture. When the rain fails, they lose everything.

Unlocking our future means urgently investing in and protecting irrigation, improving soil health, and building resilient systems. This means decisively moving to a path where every farmer, regardless of scale, is equipped with practices and knowledge to withstand the shocks.

Put the right crops in the right places

There’s a famous saying about insanity being the act of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. For too long, that has been our approach to agriculture in large parts of Zimbabwe. We have applied a one-size-fits-all policy to a country with vastly different climates and soils. The most damaging result of this is that we are still trying to grow the wrong crops in the wrong places.

Zimbabwe has some incredible, highly productive, high-rainfall areas, and productivity in these areas needs to be maximised through intensive farming. In the arid and semi-arid zones, like Matabeleland South where my Rangelands project is based, extensive dryland cropping is simply unsustainable — even when growing the more drought-resilient small-grain varieties such as millet and sorghum.

Year after year, subsistence farmers plant rain-fed crops, and year after year, the crops fail or yields are marginal, leaving them dependent on food aid and money sent from family members living in neighbouring countries. This isn’t just an economic problem; it’s a cycle of poverty and vulnerability, and climate change is making it worse.

We must pursue a deliberate strategy of aligning our land use with our ecological potential. This means being honest about what our land is best suited for.

In these marginal farming areas, we need to promote and support viable alternatives that are more profitable and climate-resilient:

The wildlife economy is one such option. In many dry regions, transitioning toward wildlife-based land uses could enhance ecosystem services and generate significant revenue. This is an immense undertaking and means taking a close, hard look at the current CAMPFIRE model, which is intended to ensure communities benefit from their wildlife resources, and making improvements to the governance and implementation to ensure that communities actually benefit from wildlife, and see it as a true economic resource. Emerging community conservancy models and community-tourism enterprises have potential, but encounter a broad range of systemic challenges that need to be addressed. This is an area I’m deeply passionate about.

Carbon credit projects: The global push for nature-based solutions offers an opportunity to harness climate finance for rural Zimbabwean communities. By restoring degraded landscapes or conserving woodlands, communities can generate carbon offset credits that are sold on international markets, turning ecosystem stewardship into a reliable source of income. Zimbabwe has had an interesting carbon credits journey over the past 15 or so years — one that I’ve experienced first-hand — but positive signs have emerged and a critical momentum is being established.

Improved livestock systems: The country cannot shy away from the hard fact that current livestock management practices are unsustainable, and overgrazing has led to large-scale land degradation. Instead of overstocking degraded rangelands, there needs to be a concerted effort towards developing improved management systems for communal farmers. History has shown us that mandating a limit to the number of livestock that a rural farmer can own simply won’t work. Instead, I believe the answer lies in several interrelated factors. The first is to drive the commercialisation of livestock farming. Instead of communal farmers owning large herds and using them as a store of wealth, only selling a few when needed, and inevitably having heavy losses due to drought, farmers need to run their livestock as a business. This would mean having smaller herds, annually selling a large portion of their livestock into established markets, and not simply focussing on growing as large a herd as possible. Of course, this requires shifts around the current views of large herds of livestock equating to significant status or wealth, and people will also need other secure and stable places to invest their wealth.

These are huge challenges to be tackled — but in the face of the climate challenges the country, and its rural population, faces, I don’t think we can shy away from them.

Make water work

If we get the land right, we then need to get the water right. Zimbabwe is making significant progress in expanding its water and irrigation infrastructure, with plans to nearly double irrigated land across the country. These investments are vital to achieving food security and decoupling production from unreliable rainfall.

But the lesson from our past is that infrastructure alone does not guarantee success.

Many smallholder irrigation schemes across Zimbabwe have failed or become under-utilised. They suffer from frequent pump breakdowns, poorly designed water delivery systems, siltation, weak farmer governance, and an unsustainable “handover” model, where assets are simply transferred to communities without the technical or financial support to maintain them.

To avoid repeating these mistakes, we must treat irrigation as a commercial and managed asset.

This means every new investment in a dam or irrigation scheme must be tied to a viable, professionally managed structure. Public-private and private-community partnerships offer a promising model.

There are a range of private-community partnerships across the country, where the community owns an irrigation scheme and a private partner operates it. Communities benefit through job creation, food security, and sharing in a portion of the revenues. The professional management of the private partner helps to ensure adequate investment into maintenance, and in several cases, further investment and expansion of the schemes. This is something that can and should be scaled up.

Genetics and technology

The final thing to highlight, which can play a major role in mitigating climate impacts and driving productivity, is the role of improved genetics and technology.

Zimbabwe’s current average maize yield is very low by global standards. It’s often less than two metric tons per hectare. In contrast, commercially advanced nations routinely achieve yields of six to ten tons per hectare. That difference is the yield gap.

The fastest, cheapest, and most efficient way to close that gap is not through massive increases in fertilizer or water, but through better seeds.

Zimbabwe must prioritise investment in plant breeding and genetics. We need seeds that are customised to survive the harsh new realities of our climate:

They must be able to withstand the inevitable mid-season dry spells that have plagued us for years.

They must fight off chronic, devastating pests like the Fall Armyworm.

They must also be able to produce higher yields with less fertilizer.

We have excellent local breeders, but much more can be done.

This brings us to a controversial, yet necessary, discussion in Zimbabwean agriculture: genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

Zimbabwe currently maintains a strict ban on growing GMO crops.

It’s a complex issue — but on my travels to Brazil and the United States, some of the world’s most dominant agricultural producing nations, the adoption of approved GMO maize, cotton, and soya has been a game-changer.

It provides several benefits that are crucial for a developing economy:

GMO crops with built-in pest resistance virtually eliminate the damage from major pests, dramatically increasing harvest security and reducing the need for expensive, toxic chemical sprays.

The reduction in pesticide use lowers the farmer’s input costs, making them more profitable and competitive.

It provides a predictable yield floor, reducing the annual risk of crop failure.

Of course there are trade-offs to be considered. There is an ongoing debate regarding the potential health impacts of GMO crops, which many say has been disproven, but I think the more critical issue is around food sovereignty, and the risk of becoming beholden to large multinational agricultural companies that produce seeds.

Zimbabwe needs to undertake a science-led re-evaluation of the current GMO stance. The continued ban on GMOs is limiting our farmers’ competitiveness and our national food security. This re-evaluation could instantly increase resilience to climate change, transform much of Zimbabwe’s agricultural production, and improve food security.

Join me in the next episode, where I talk about two central issues to Zimbabwe’s agricultural future: how to grow the commercial farming sector as an economic engine, and how to elevate the millions of farmers trapped in subsistence agriculture.

This is Steve Pocock Explores — a place to share what I’m curious about, what I’m grappling with, and what gives me hope.

This series is about the future of farming in Zimbabwe, informed by my work in the sector and lessons from visiting over 100 farms and agribusinesses worldwide as part of my Nuffield Scholarship.

Links

Check out my Nuffield Report on the Future of Farming in Zimbabwe here

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