Questions de développement ...

African agriculture faces the challenges of feeding a growing population, eradicating poverty and food insecurity, responding to the climate crisis and ensuring environmental sustainability. To address these challenges investment is needed to reinforce local food systems and to enhance smallholders’ food production, strengthen their resilience, increase their revenues and support their own investments – which constitute the bulk of all thosemade. Key questions are: what production systems and products to support? Which markets to target? Who should benefit?

Small-scale farmers – who previously contributed slightly less than half of the 1.8 million tonnes of grain to the Grain Marketing Board’s national reserve annually – have been left to fill it almost entirely.This is because Zimbabwe’s commercial farmers, most of whom are beneficiaries of the country’s controversial and violent land reform programme of 2000, are producing way below expectation, despite occupying the most productive land