Zambia's Agricultural Paradox and the Case for Climate-Smart Agriculture

That gap is not a rounding error. It is a structural problem, and it has been quietly shaping the terms on which Zambia’s rural households face climate change, market shocks, and food insecurity. My ongoing research at North-West University starts from precisely this tension: not the climate science of agriculture, but the adoption question. Why do some smallholder farmers embrace climate-smart agricultural practices, and why do so many others not? To answer that question properly, you first have to understand the economy they are farming inside.

The growth story the headline numbers tell

Between 2000 and 2022, Zambia’s GDP grew from roughly $3.6 billion to $29 billion, nearly an eightfold increase in nominal terms. By any measure, that is a significant economic trajectory. Over the same period, the country managed largely positive annual growth, weathered the 2008 financial crisis reasonably well, and became one of the more stable economies in sub-Saharan Africa by formal classification.

The 2020 contraction told a different story. GDP declined by 2.8%, inflation peaked at 25%, and the fragility of the growth model was exposed again. The reason was not complicated: copper prices and global demand fell, and the rest of the economy had limited capacity to absorb the shock.

What copper explains

Copper has accounted for between 68% and 74% of Zambia’s total export value in every five-year period since 2005. The dependence is not incidental to Zambia’s economic story. It is the economic story.

Where that copper goes is a small lesson in reading trade data. Zambia’s export statistics record Switzerland as the largest destination, and the metal does not go to Switzerland. Swiss-based traders take title to it and resell it onward, mostly into Asia, while the cargo itself never touches Swiss soil; Zambian copper does not appear in Swiss import statistics at all. Most of it ends up in China. So the destination in our own export figures is a balance sheet rather than a place, which is worth knowing before anyone builds a trade strategy on it.

Copper alone contributes about 15% of GDP and more than 70% of export earnings, and mining as a whole employs around 2% of the workforce: 73,203 jobs, or 2.4% of total employment, in 2019. Agriculture contributes about 4% of GDP and employs more than half of the workforce (World Bank, 2025). If you were designing an economy for volatility and vulnerability, this is roughly what it would look like. The sector with massive global price exposure drives the macroeconomy. The sector that actually sustains rural livelihoods operates far below its potential output.

This is the structural context that makes agricultural transformation not just a rural development goal but a national economic one. The question of whether a smallholder farmer in Central or Eastern Province adopts drought-tolerant crop varieties, conservation farming techniques, or improved soil management is not a question about individual behaviour in isolation. It is a question embedded in decades of investment patterns, market access gaps, extension service failures, and policy choices that have consistently prioritised the copper belt over the agriculture belt.

Where the CSA adoption question sits

Climate-Smart Agriculture, as a framework, asks farmers to do three things simultaneously: adapt to climate variability, build longer-term resilience, and where possible, reduce the emissions intensity of their production. For a smallholder operating on less than two hectares, managing variable rainfall, and selling into fragmented local markets, those three goals arrive as practical trade-offs against immediate constraints: seed costs, access to inputs, whether there is someone nearby who can demonstrate what a changed practice looks like, and whether the household can absorb the risk of trying something new in a bad season.

My dataset covers 2,116 smallholder households across Zambia’s major agricultural provinces. The analysis explores who adopts CSA practices, under what conditions, and what factors most reliably predict uptake. The macroeconomic graphs that contextualise this research are not just academic throat-clearing. They establish why the adoption gap matters. In a country where agriculture employs more than half the workforce but generates only a fraction of national output, the productivity frontier is one of the few levers that does not require a copper price rally.

What the regional comparisons suggest

Zambia’s agricultural value added performance, compared with regional peers including Botswana and Mozambique, has been characterised by significant year-to-year volatility. This is a common feature of rain-fed systems with limited irrigation coverage and high exposure to seasonal variation. It is also exactly the kind of volatility that CSA practices are designed to reduce. Drought-tolerant varieties, soil conservation, and diversified cropping systems do not eliminate climate risk, but they change the probability distribution of outcomes for households that are one failed season away from a food security crisis.

The case for accelerating CSA adoption in Zambia is, at its core, a case for structural economic change at the household level. It is about shifting the productivity floor upward in a sector that employs tens of millions of people regionally but operates well below what the land and the labour can produce.

What I am trying to learn

This research will not single-handedly resolve Zambia’s structural economic challenges. What it aims to do is produce rigorous, policy-relevant evidence on the factors that drive or constrain adoption among smallholder farmers, grounded in the actual data rather than assumed frameworks. The aim is to give policymakers, extension services, and development organisations clearer signals about where intervention is most likely to move the needle.

The 4% GDP figure will not change overnight. But that employment figure represents millions of households whose livelihoods, productivity, and resilience to climate shocks are directly shaped by whether or not agricultural transformation happens at scale. That is the problem worth researching. That is what my ongoing research is about.