Can Zimbabwe destroy its agriculture and still develop its economy?

Whichever way the Zimbabwe saga works out, there seems little doubt that the development of a sophisticated agro-economy over many decades in that country, its decimation under the name of righting historical wrongs and whether and how there will be a recovery will provide many fascinating lessons for historians, economists and politicians for a long time to come.

I stumbled across this fascinating article by Peter Timmer entitled “Why Zimbabwe cannot leap-frog agriculture,” in which he asks whether it is possible for that country to make any significant progress without the large-scale commercial farming sector which it has all but destroyed carefully, deliberately and piece by piece since 2000.
The article is short and refreshingly jargon-free for one dealing with economic issues, but for those without the stomach for the original, here’s a distillation : He starts off by playing a game in which destroying agriculture was not the by-product of the Mugabe government’s campaign against the MDC (opposition party)-supporting white commercial farmers, but was a deliberate effort by that government to no longer have the economy dependent on agriculture.
The supposition is that the country would be in a position to import all its food needs by engaging in more foreign-currency lucrative activities that would make it possible to do this. This may sound absurd now, given the fact that for several years the country has struggled to import basic things like fuel, when many poorer countries have not had a fuel crisis, but it is worth it to indulge Timmer and play along with him for the interesting points he makes.
He answers his own rhetorical question with,” Historically, the answer is clear. No country has been able to sustain a rapid transition out of poverty without raising productivity in its agricultural sector (with the special exceptions of Hong Kong and Singapore.) A dynamic agriculture raises labour productivity in the rural economy, pulls up wages, and gradually eliminates the worst dimensions of absolute poverty.”
This lays the foundation for other kinds of growth, paradoxically eventually making agriculture less important as other more lucrative opportunities become more sustainably available to the population. He say, “Ten years ago, Zimbabwe seemed headed down that path of sustainable development.”
He continues, “Viewed from this historical perspective, Zimbabwe now seems to be making a tragic mistake by destroying its commercial agriculture. Not only is the country no longer the bread basket of Africa, it is dependent on increasingly skeptical donors for food aid to feed its own people.”
He goes on to talk about how Zimbabwe’s unique experience of self-destruction will be pored over by development economists for the lessons it provides to the world. Timmer says the Zimbabwean “experiment” at destroying commercial agriculture and trying to replace it with communal agriculture “is likely to end badly,” which it arguably has already done. He ends by saying Zimbabwe’s is a story of the economic and other effects of “tragic political miscalculation.”
Apart from the implications of Timmer's thesis on any prospect of recovery if and when the country solves its deep political fissures, his points also have tremendous relevance for Namibia and South Africa, particularly the latter. Despite an admirably smooth political transition from apartheid, the social and economic pressures of transition from a history that has left deep scars and resentments may not be quite so smooth nor easy.
It will be interesting to observe what lessons that country chooses to draw from the Zimbabwean experience, which casts a shadow over South Africa in ways obvious and not so obvious. Impatience over what is considered the slow pace of land reform there is building up, and it will be interesting to see whether the politicians can stave off this pressure long enough to find a way of re-distributing land for equity while ensuring continued productivity, a clear-cut concept in theory, but one whose actual implementation faces countless political, economic, cultural and other hurdles, as the Zimbabwe experience seems to show.
Whether one accepts or agrees with his analysis and conclusions or not, Timmers excellent and thoughtful article should be required for all in southern Africa who must deal with the difficult task of somehow moulding dynamic and yet more equitable societies out of exclusively prosperous and repressive ones.

Chido Makunike

African Agriculture