Zambia’s collapsed food system: never-ending debt, climate shocks, biodiversity loss and FISPs – the indispensability of transitioning to agroecology
In this briefing, we look at how Zambia is facing a gathering food crisis of serious proportions. Amidst repeated droughts and floods, energy rationing, and shortages of drinkable water, food prices are rising and millions are at risk of acute food shortages and malnutrition.
The drought in 2023/24 has brought the food system to the brink of collapse.
- In just the first half of the year, one million hectares of maize have been lost (almost 50% of what is under cultivation).
- The price of maize had risen by 30%, nearly double the five-year average, driving an increase in food prices and reducing availability and access to affordable food.
- About six million people are at risk of acute food shortages and malnutrition, with close to 10 million directly affected.
Crippling debt has forced the government to relinquish up to 80% of its revenue on external repayments, leading to a default. Over these years, this never-ending debt has denuded the state’s ability to fund essential public goods such as education, health and basic services. This leads to increasingly fragile services and infrastructure, and reduced ability to absorb multiple shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic, and sharp rises in imported food and fertiliser costs.
It is untenable that this brutal extraction from Africa continues – after slavery, colonialism and dispossession – despite the human and environmental costs, merely to ensure financial institutions can relentlessly accrue greater profits year after year. However, African governments must also assume some responsibility for taking loans and then squandering them in ways that have not benefited their populations.
Throughout this debt crisis, Zambian agricultural policy has centred on the provision of subsidised conventional agricultural inputs through the farm input subsidy programme (FISP). Is the FISP, and the more recent pivot towards large-scale industrial-commercial agriculture production, really the appropriate approach for Zambia?
Clearly these policies are not meeting expectations, as hunger and crop failures stalk the country. Subsidising massive amounts of synthetic fertilisers and hybrid seeds has resulted in soil degradation and water pollution, deforestation and biodiversity loss, and farmer economic dependency on external inputs primarily produced by multinational corporations.
Producers will want to protect the natural resource base on which their livelihoods depend, but are confronted with limited options. A downward spiral is created as soil degradation and loss of ecological resilience forces producers to seek new lands for production, or even to abandon production and migrate to urban areas in search of a more stable existence. Land use change, and in particular the clearing of natural lands and forests, for cultivation and settlement, is a major cause of biodiversity loss and climate change.
This paper explores the role of the FISP in both driving ecological degradation and limiting the (re)emergence of ecological farming systems able to deliver both nutrition and decent livelihoods.
The format of the FISP has exacerbated the current situation. It is a blanket subsidy that does not account for the need to deal with drought, there is no effort made to promote water-harvesting techniques or use of local seeds that can withstand local conditions, for example. It has worked against diversification of production with its focus on maize. The blanket application also means there is no consideration of the different soils and agroecological zones in Zambia. It has contributed to ecological degradation.
Muketoi Wamunyina, Country Director, PELUM Zambia
As the primary food producers in Zambia, smallholder farmers make an essential contribution to the public good and must continue to receive support. But the short-term approach of providing damaging inputs from one season to the next must make way for a longer term approach that can systematically support farmers to regenerate the soil, conserve biological resources, and diversify production based on local need and preference. This is the path to building the urgently needed resilience and adaptive capacity that will allow smallholder farmers and their communities to survive and thrive in the midst of the turmoil of our times.
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Related resources
Briefings
https://acbio.org.za/corporate-expansion/transforming-fisp-diversified-agroecology-practices-pemba-district-southern-province-zambia/https://acbio.org.za/corporate-expansion/transforming-farm-input-support-programme-fisp-diversified-agroecology-practices-mongu-district/
Videos of the Zambia exchange in 2019
Media mentions
Mail & Guardian: Bill Gates plays God in Africa’s agriculture and gets it wrong
Africa Science News: African faith leaders demand reparations from the Gates Foundation
