Zambia Recognizes Agroecology on Paper but Refuses to Fund It

Dudzai Matsapa is in his field outside Nyanga, in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands, digging shallow pits into hard ground under a merciless sun. He is not waiting for a ministry to rescue him. He is preparing for the drought himself, because he knows it is coming and no one has told him he can count on help.

Ask yourself what it says about a continent when a father of six has to do the planning that his government should have funded years ago. Ask why the most effective drought defence in rural southern Africa is a hand-dug hole, a pile of cow dung and a farmer who has taught himself the science.

The El Niño warming pattern is strengthening across the Pacific. In September, the World Meteorological Organization warned that it could bring months of extreme heat, floods and drought across the globe. Forecasters expect it to peak in late 2026 and linger until at least February 2027. That is not a distant possibility. It is a timetable, and our farmers are already running out of it.

Consider what Matsapa is actually doing. Instead of ploughing his entire field, he disturbs only the exact spots where seeds will go. These potholes catch rainwater, concentrate organic matter and sharply raise yields in dry land. He makes his own compost by mixing cow dung and dried grass and leaving it to decompose for weeks. Since 2021 he has practised zero tillage, which keeps soil intact and moisture locked in, and he plants short-season varieties of maize, groundnuts, sunflower, sorghum and millet. This is agroecology: food production that rebuilds the soil rather than mining it.

The evidence is not sentimental. A report published last month by the charity ActionAid found that agroecology can match or beat industrial agriculture on yields. Among its findings was a 41 percent average rise in cereal yields across Sub-Saharan Africa from rotating legumes with cereals. Netsai Dodzo, Matsapa's neighbour, intercrops her fields so that different crops shield each other from pests, hold the soil together against erosion and slow the evaporation of moisture. She makes her own pest controls from garlic, chilli and other plants. Neither of them is a laboratory scientist. Both are doing what the science says works.

Now cross the border into Zambia's Western Province, where the Sesheke district tells the same story. Nswau Kufanga grows kafwamba, a local maize seed that matures early and needs little water. Namuchana Mubita reports harvests of up to 2.8 tonnes of maize in a good rainy season, and still more than a tonne during a previous drought, enough to feed his four children until the next harvest. Benjamin Mtembo of Zambia's Ministry of Agriculture says the 14 villages under his supervision show the same pattern. When drought hits, farmers using agroecology fare better than those who do not.

Be honest about the hard edges. Dodzo and Matsapa both report losing around half their harvests in droughts. That is a catastrophe for any family, and it is the reason we cannot romanticise these methods. Agroecology does not abolish drought. It keeps families fed through it. That difference is the difference between a bad year and a funeral.

So why are farmers doing this alone? Faides Temba, executive director of ActionAid Zambia, has put her finger on the wound. Zambia has written sustainable agriculture into its policy documents. It has not yet financed agroecology as a national priority. Paper commitments do not feed children. Budget lines do. Every kwacha that goes to imported fertiliser subsidies that enrich middlemen while leaving soil degraded, and every naira's worth of ministerial attention on flashy import schemes, is a choice. Governments choose the methods that enrich their networks over the methods that enrich their farmers. Let us name that for what it is: negligence dressed up as policy.

The FAO has been clear that the time to act is before the drought, not after. Farmers who wait for the rains to fail will be buying food at inflated prices from the very traders who profited from their desperation. Pre-positioned seed, extension officers on the ground, early warning systems that reach a village before the wind changes, these are not luxuries. They are the price of a functioning state.

Here is what a serious government does. It puts agroecology into the national budget with ring-fenced funding, not donor-dependent pilot projects that vanish when the consultants leave. It secures land tenure for smallholders, because a farmer who fears eviction will not invest in soil he may never harvest again. It funds agricultural extension services that teach potholing, intercropping and seed selection to every district, and it trains local officers to measure results so that success can be replicated. It opens space for private seed businesses, cooperatives and input suppliers to compete, so that no single ministry or politically connected company controls what farmers can plant. Botswana, long praised for its drought management and rule-of-law record, shows that disciplined institutions and transparent planning can carry a country through a dry cycle. Mauritius shows what open markets and accountable governance can do for a small island economy. Africa has the models. What it lacks is the political will to adopt them at scale.

Regional bodies have a role too. The Southern African Development Community should pool early-warning data, coordinate seed reserves across member states and create a standing fund that releases money the moment El Niño forecasts cross a danger threshold. Donors and development banks should stop rewarding governments for announcing strategies and start rewarding them for funding them.

And the citizens? They must stop accepting excuses. Ask your MP how much of next year's budget goes to agroecology and extension services, and when the answer is vague, keep asking. Ask your district agriculture officer how many farmers have been trained in water-harvesting techniques. Support the cooperatives and civil society groups that are doing the work the state will not. Demand that every drought relief programme be measured by the harvests it protects, not by the press releases it produces.

Dudzai Matsapa has done his part. He said it plainly: "I have already done my part. Now, I am just waiting." That should shame every minister in the region. A farmer should not have to wait for permission to survive. He should be waiting for a government that has already done its job. Zambia and Zimbabwe, and every African capital watching the clock tick toward February 2027, must move from recognising agroecology to funding it, from talking about resilience to budgeting for it. The rains are coming. The question is whether our leaders will be ready, or whether they will leave our farmers to dig the pits alone.

Based on reporting by RFI