Centre For Agriculture and Food Policy

Thematic Area 2- Agricultural Transformation, Institutions, Markets and Trade Development

Efficient agricultural markets and trade can encourage agriculture-led economic growth and food security in Zimbabwe. However, ineffective and often inconsistent policies, weak institutions, high transaction costs, increasing costs of doing business, and inadequate infrastructure hamper efforts to move toward a private sector-led market-oriented economy. These challenges lead to thin or missing markets, inadequate access to finance, and high production and marketing risks among others.

Zimbabwe has great potential to regain its status as the regional food breadbasket given the country’s diverse agro-ecological diversity, water supplies, large tracts of arable farmland, and proximity to large neighbouring food-deficit markets. Also, the rapid rise in population and urbanization leading to high demand for diverse food commodities present great prospects for smallholder farmers to earn higher incomes from increased participation in the domestic markets and regional trade.

Research priorities: Research under this thematic area will focus on providing answers to the following policy objectives/issues:

  • Promoting access to rural financial services through innovative tools.

Indicative research areas are as follows:

  • Identify strategies on how to incentivize everyone to participate in the financial system;
  • Identify strategies to effectively and sustainably promote access to rural financial services; and
  • Research on how to sustainably deal with the twin challenges the country is facing of sustaining macro-economic stability and climate change.
  • Strengthening the coordination of farmer and commodity associations.

Indicative research areas are as follows:

  • Identify innovative and sustainable financing models to support and strengthen farmer unions’ roles and activities in policy development and advocacy.
  • Development of competitive and self-sustaining input supply system and mechanisms.

Indicative research areas are as follows:

  • Examine the implications of government participation in the input support market and down stream markets;
  • Incentives for private-sector development to sustainably invest in input supply; and
  • Public and private sector roles in reducing input and output costs, supply of and demand for modern inputs and outputs, agro-processing, and regional trade.
  • Attracting local and foreign direct investment into agriculture.

Indicative research areas are as follows:

  • Identify strategies, incentivies and policies on how to effectively attract local and foreign investment into agriculture and food sector; and
  • Carry out value chain analysis and mapping to provide up to date information on agriculture and food setcor business opportunities by region and district in support of the country’s devolution agenda.
  • Export promotion and diversification into high value crops.

Indicative research areas are as follows:

  • Utilise the food systems approach to identify strategies and innovations to develop Zimbabwe’s organic food industry; and
  • Identify conditions required for farmers to participate in export markets and associated policies and support infrastructure required for them to competitively participate in lucrative export markets.
  • Transferability and bankability of land tenure systems to unlock private funding.

Indicative research areas are as follows:

  • Conduct research on what else can be attached to the 99 year leases to make them acceptable to financial institutions;
  • Identify innovations on how to structure finance for communal farmers to borrow for agribusiness enterprises; and
  • Examine the effectiveness of the current value chain financing and draw lessons learnt for designing appropriate and more effective models that suit different types of farmers.