The name is absent

88

A noncommercial farm, according to the above criteria, are those farms not selling the
minimum quantities to any of the parastatal agencies mentioned. Numbers and areas of commercial
farms (and noncommercial farms as the remainder) would tend to fluctuate from year to year as farms
swing from one sector to the other, depending on whether the threshold quantities are produced or
whether the produce is sold through state or informal channels.

According to data published in the Commercial Farms Series, the distribution of land among
farms in the commercial sector is highly skewed (table 3.7). Although small farms with 0-199 hectares
account for 42.9 percent of total commercial farms in 1989-90, the most recent year for which
complete data were available, they control only 2.1 percent of cultivated area in the sector. In
contrast, farms of over 2,000 hectares occupy 65.8 percent of the land even though only 11.4 percent
of all farms are of this size. The remaining 31.2 percent and 14.6 percent of farms in the 200-799
and 800-1,999 hectare range cultivate 13.5 percent and 18.6 percent of the land in the sector.

Table 3.7: Number and size of farms, commercial farm sector, 1990

Source: Commercial Farm Series data.

Since 1975, 1990 is the first year in the time series that data are reported for all provinces.
Prior to this date, provincial data except those for Central, Southern, and Lusaka regions were
collapsed into the category Copperbelt/Others as illustrated in annex 3.1. Unfortunately, in 1989, data
for farm sizes were reduced from six to four categories: the 0-79 and 80-199 categories became one
category; and the 200-399 and 400-799 categories were merged into a second new category.
Presumably this change was meant to economize on data collection and reporting. Unfortunately,
collapsing the two smallest farm categories into one (i.e., 0-199 hectares) will make it difficult to
monitor and assess rates of expansion by the emerging small- and medium-scale commercial farms
which, as indicated in chapter 1, are reportedly expanding at a rapid pace. Many of these farms are
10-20 hectares. By including them with farms up to 199 hectares, it is difficult to assess the extent
to which small- and medium-scale farms are affecting the composition of farms in the commercial
sector, and the extent to which they are fully being captured in the CSO sampling frame.

Table 3.8 illustrates some important regional differences in the distribution of commercial
farms. In terms of numbers, most are located in the more-densely settled Central (577 farms, 30.7
percent of the total), followed by North-Western (500 farms, 26.6 percent), and Southern provinces

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