Table 1.4: Number of farm units by size and province, 19896
|
L |
Large-scale |
Medium-scale |
Emergent |
Smallholder |
|
Southern |
330 |
9,000 |
51,000 |
6,000 |
|
Central |
300 |
7,500 |
21,000 |
18,000 |
|
Lusaka |
90 |
2,000 |
4,500 |
14,000 |
|
Copperbelt |
500 |
2,000 |
18,000 | |
|
Eastern |
20 |
6,000 |
23,000 |
8,000 |
|
Western |
10 |
5,400 |
85,000 | |
|
North-Western |
70 |
2,900 |
53,000 | |
|
Luapula |
60 |
2,000 |
73,000 | |
|
Northern |
- |
90 |
7,400 |
112,000 |
|
Zambia |
740 |
25,230 |
119,200 |
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________4 |
a. Estimates provided by the Ministry of Agriculture and reported in World Bank, "Draft Economic Report for
Zambia CG Meeting" (1993), p. 40.
b. The discrepancy between the column sum (387,000) and the total indicates a discrepancy of 72,000
households.
However, a recent study commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Foods and Fisheries
(MAFF) and the World Bank (DHV Consultants BY, Netherlands, and Wood Consultants and
Investments Ltd., Zambia, 1993), hereafter referred to as the MAFF/WB report, indicates that as
much as 43 percent of the potentially arable land in the commercial farming sector is being
underutilized for crop production (table 1.5). 6 According to the study, many farms owned by the
Government Republic of Zambia (GRZ) and many of the Zambia National Service Farms are poorly
managed and undercapitalized; the prison farms are only marginally better. Parastatals, including
farms held by Zambia Agricultural Development Ltd., Cold Storage Board, and Indeco, were also
found to be experiencing high rates of underutilization. Other areas found to be class I underutilized
farms are settlement schemes (Munyama, Mpimo in Kabwe, Chinjarain, Chipata) and most previously-
owned TBZ (Tobacco Board of Zambia) farms (Mukonchi, Chibwe, etc.). However, high degrees of
underutilization were also found in the private sector. Among private farms currently underutilized
were those owned by civil servants, parastatal employees, and armed forces personnel who manage
their farms as absentee landlords or leave their operation to relatives who lack basic farm-management
skills. According to the study, the combination of inexperience and undercapitalization coupled with
varying degrees of indebtedness have resulted in vast tracts of prime land lying idle.
The land has been cleared but not cropped and is being used for rough grazing, including grassland on prime arable land.
Determining whether livestock production is an "inefficient" land use relative to crop use would be difficult to assess without
a domestic resource cost analysis, but the data suggest that substantial expansion of crop agriculture on lands in the commercial
sector is possible without further expansion onto virgin soils.