Zimbabwe’s agriculture and food security: past, present and future (1960–2050)

This chapter discusses food system change in Zimbabwe focusing on changes in agricultural productivity and food security from 1960 to 2050. The 1960s are an important starting point as they mark the emergence of institutionalized drought-related food relief. Rapid population growth, land appropriation by white settlers and the progressive concentration of Africans on marginal soils had made rural households’ farming and food security dependent on the colonial wage labour economy. When the wage economy faltered in the early 1960s, the poor could no longer produce or buy enough food. After independence Zimbabwe experienced a smallholder production boom and became southern Africa’s food basket. Government support for the smallholder sector boosted food security while the large-scale commercial farming sector increasingly withdrew from food crop production. An emergent employment crisis and the withdrawal of government support undercut the food-producing smallholder farming sector, resulting in growing food insecurity. Zimbabwe’s radical land reform in the early 2000s thus neither caused nor alleviated the country’s growing food import dependency. An economic meltdown, characterized by hyperinflation, exacerbated the food import situation. Donor-funded emergency food relief became a recurrent phenomenon. More than a decade after land reform there are signs of improvement: food production is picking up and has become more evenly distributed over large-scale and small-scale producers and agro-ecological zones. Whether Zimbabwe’s food security situation will further improve in the coming decades is probably more dependent on developments outside the agricultural sector than within it.