The agricultural scene in Zambia has a burgeoning cluster of farming enthusiasts who are trying out their luck with the occupation, albeit informally. There will be need for statistics to show how many agricultural experts and trained professionals the country has produced overtime. Suffice to say, the huge interest in agriculture among Zambians can be seen by a simple check on the social media platform Facebook. The Facebook group Small Scale Farmers (Farming as Business), for instance, has a whooping half a million members. That is, to put it in graphic terms, more than 506,800 members!
According to the United Nation’s (UN) Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and they quote Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture, small scale farmers are those that farm on less than 5 ha.[i] So those farmers on that platform belong to this category. My gut feeling is that that number does not include medium and large scale farmers who are arguably not looking for farming tips.
Few Zambian pages or groups command such a huge following! These numbers are reserved for pages whose owners are celebrities (or as they are popularly referred to these days, influencers), or news pages like Mwebantu or indeed, the usual suspects, Politicians. This is indeed encouraging.
What this also means is that there is an urgent need to harness all these enthusiasts and their resources and in order to grow the sector and see how their collective muscle can contribute to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). According to a 2012 World Bank report, agriculture and agribusiness contributed about 20 percent of GDP and about 12 percent of exports from national exports![ii] A more recent report (published in 2021) by the United States International Trade Administration shows that in recent times, there has been a slight drop of agriculture’s contribution to the GDP by 1%.[iii] But one can see that we are sitting on gold that is waiting to be mined.
So that many number of subscribers to that farming page/group goes to show that over and above everything, there is a lot of potential in farming/agriculture. The people are organising themselves for production. They genuinely want to go into farming and succeed at making money from it. So they have joined that Facebook group to learn and share experiences with like-minded people how to go about it.
This is a huge opportunity to grow the sector. That collective will must be harnessed. A creative coordinating effort must be put in place to pool all the agricultural produce that comes of those efforts in order to create market opportunities for not just the local but export markets in order for our farmers to derive maximum benefits but also for the country to earn much needed forex. This has the potential to improve our economy as country. Those small scale farmers can potentially grow to become medium and large scale farmers.
[i] https://www.fao.org/3/U0575E/U0575E03.htm, accessed 29th April, 2022
[ii] “World Bank. 2012. Agribusiness Indicators : Zambia. World Bank, Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/26224 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
[iii] https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/zambia-agriculture
