Agricultural Transformation in Zimbabwe
Uploaded by Anita Acavalos on Oct 24, 2007
The agricultural transformation model describes the process whereby the structure of a country’s economy changes as it develops from a low to a high income country. The model’s four main elements are rapid and sustained growth of national income per capita in all economic sectors increasing the productive capacity of the economy; declining relative importance of agriculture in the economy in terms of share of GDP and employment; increasing agricultural productivity and declining agricultural labour force in absolute and relative terms . These are mainly a result of increased supply in the agricultural sector and the consequent creation of a marketable surplus due to technological improvements and a decrease in the demand for agricultural products as a proportion of income due to Engel’s law. Thus, throughout the Agricultural Transformation Process, agriculture is observed to be a declining sector with declining internal terms of trade. Although this model describes the transformation of a subsistence economy to a developed market economy, this process is not inevitable and as the case of Zimbabwe demonstrates can be thrown into reverse by a confluence of political turmoil, collapse of investor confidence, counterproductive government policies and extraneous variables such as world commodity prices, adverse weather and disease.
When Zimbabwe was a colony and whites controlled the land, the economy saw per capita earnings reaching a record high that they haven’t reached since, although admittedly blacks earned only a 20th of what whites did. Thus we see that Zimbabwe did start off displaying characteristics that fit into our model such as the increase in national income in all sectors and the increase of agricultural factor productivity in commercial farming seen in the following graph .
This increase in factor productivity and consequently output, was mainly due to technology and capital introduced by white farmers who owned most of the commercial farms. Thus, commercial farming in Zimbabwe was booming in that era without being subject to great volatility. On the other hand as shown in the following graph the situation was very different in communal and smallholder farms mainly owned by blacks .
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