Farming – Food Systems & Sustainability · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026
Botswana imports much of what it eats, and a dry year exposes how thin that arrangement can be. In June 2026, councils responded close to the ground, rolling out cooperative farming schemes and community gardens to mitigate drought and import dependence amid rising food insecurity. The move is notable for its level. National food strategy usually lives in ministries and import accounts; this is local government putting plots, shared inputs and pooled labour where households actually are.
It is a smaller lever than trade policy, but it is one councils can pull without waiting for a national programme to mobilise. That immediacy is the point of a council-led response: when the rains fail and prices climb, the body closest to the affected ward can act on a timescale a central ministry rarely matches.
The Pressure: Drought and the Import Bill
Two forces are named together for a reason. Drought reduces what the country can grow, which deepens reliance on imports, which exposes households to prices set outside Botswana's borders – largely across the South African border, through the same SACU supply chains that feed most local shelves. When the regional harvest is poor or the rand moves, that exposure is felt directly in Gaborone and Francistown kitchens. A semi-arid country with limited arable land is structurally short on the buffer that food self-sufficiency provides.
Community gardens do not break that loop on their own, but they shorten it. Food grown in the ward is food not bought at an importer's price, and produce that travels metres rather than hundreds of kilometres is less exposed to fuel costs and border delays. Even modest local production trims the volume a household must buy at the prices a drought pushes upward, and it keeps a share of the food spend circulating inside the district rather than leaving it.
A vegetable grown in the ward is a price the importer no longer sets.
The Model: Cooperatives as Shared Risk
Cooperative schemes work by pooling – seed, water access, tools, and the labour to use them – so that members reach a scale none could manage alone. For a smallholder facing an unreliable rainy season, the cooperative functions partly as an insurance arrangement, spreading the cost of a failed season across more shoulders than a single plot carries, and partly as a way to justify investment – a borehole, fencing, shared irrigation – that no lone household could repay.
There is a development logic here that aligns with Botswana's long-standing aim of broadening the rural economy beyond cattle and subsistence cropping. A functioning cooperative can graduate from feeding its members to supplying local markets, schools and clinics, keeping money circulating within the district rather than exporting it to importers. The same pooled structure that manages drought risk is also the unit through which a community farm becomes a small commercial enterprise – and the point at which it starts to interest a buyer, a lender or a council procurement officer.
Pooled inputs let a smallholder farm at a scale – and carry a risk – a single household cannot.
Whether these schemes hold through the next dry cycle is the test that matters, and it cannot be answered in a single season. Community gardens have a record of fading once the immediate crisis passes and the volunteers tire. What the June rollout establishes is a principle worth holding: when the import bill and the rain both turn against you, the response can begin at the council and the community plot, not only at the national border. The operators who treat these schemes as durable supply infrastructure – rather than drought relief – are the ones who will find them still standing when the rains next fail.
Sources: allAfrica
