Chapter 7:
Land Use Patterns and Growth in Commercial Input Use,
Productivity, and Profitability by Farm Size Category
by
Jeffrey A. Cochrane and Michael J. Roth'
I. Introduction
This chapter examines trends in cultivated area and production in order to understand the
changing patterns of Zambian land use and management. Reported data suggest that in the commercial
farms sector there has been over the past two decades a general diversification of production away
from maize and into primarily wheat and soybeans. In the late 1980s, harvested land area under maize
has been replaced by these other crops, with the overall harvested area remaining roughly constant.
In the noncommercial farms sector, data suggest that production in much of the country has fluctuated
greatly with no clearly discernible trend. The principal exception is the far northeastern region of the
country where maize production has increased dramatically, particularly from 1976 to 1986. These
and other results are discussed below in detail after a preliminary note concerning data sources and
their reliability.
II. Data sources
The next chapter provides a detailed discussion of data issues. This section focuses on
particular problems affecting the analysis of changes in land use patterns. Table 7.1 summarizes
various selected Zambian data sources by year as used in the preparation of this chapter.
For verification and comparison purposes, a number of key national statistics were drawn from
the Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture and from the World
Bank. These other sources generally provide national statistics, sometimes broken down by crop, but
are based upon primary CSO and other Zambian government data. This report focuses upon results
gleaned directly from the primary Zambian sources.
The CSO of the Zambian Government conducted several crop forecasting exercises covering
all farms. These provide the most recent data available for our analysis. Forecasts are available for
1991 and 1992, 2 and the publication for the 1991 crop forecast includes actual production data for
the 1990 season, which is not available from any other known source. The 1992 forecast publication
breaks down farms into two size categories, the first being a small/medium category and the second
covering large farms, though the report does not provide definitions of these categories.
Jeffrey A. Cochrane is postdoctoral research fellow with the Land Tenure Center and Department of Agricultural
Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Michael J. Roth is associate research scientist with the Land Tenure
Center and Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2 Years refer to the beginning of a cropping season.