Farming – Agribusiness & Value Chains · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026

Botswana's wealth has long come out of the ground in carats, not crops. Agriculture employs and feeds far more people than it earns for the national accounts, a mismatch that has framed the diversification debate for a generation. At Masama Market in April 2026, Assistant Minister Baratiwa Mathoothe set agriculture an ambitious target: to become the country's top GDP contributor, displacing the minerals that have carried the economy since independence.

Getting there, he told farmers, runs through three shifts: forming cooperatives, leasing unused land and embracing agro-processing. None is novel on its own, but stated together they describe a coherent move from subsistence habits toward enterprise behaviour. Each addresses a different structural weakness in the sector, and the case for the target rests on whether all three can move at once.

The Scale Problem: Cooperatives Over Single Plots

Smallholders acting alone struggle to reach the volume that buyers, processors and lenders take seriously. A retailer wants consistent supply; a processor wants a steady throughput; a bank wants a borrower large enough to underwrite. The individual farmer with a few hectares meets none of these on their own. Cooperatives are the standard remedy: pooled output to fill larger orders, shared equipment to lower per-unit cost, and collective bargaining that shifts farmers from price-takers toward price-makers.

The model has deep precedent across the region, from Kenyan dairy cooperatives to South African grain pools, where aggregation is what unlocked formal markets and credit. The minister's call to organise is, in effect, a call to reach commercial scale without waiting for every farmer to grow large alone. The harder part, as those same regional examples show, is governance: a cooperative only delivers if it is run well enough to keep members in and side-selling out.

One farmer fills a basket; a cooperative fills a contract.

The Land Problem: Leasing What Lies Idle

Urging farmers to lease unused land speaks to a familiar inefficiency, where arable ground sits fallow while willing producers go without. In a country where water and good soil are scarce, leaving usable land dormant is an expensive habit. A working lease market moves land toward whoever will actually farm it, turning a dormant asset into output without anyone having to buy or sell the underlying right.

It is also a low-capital lever, more a matter of arrangement than of new spending, which makes it attractive in a tight fiscal moment. The constraint is rarely the idea and usually the plumbing: clear tenure, enforceable lease terms and the confidence that a lessee can invest in a season's crop without losing the ground under it. Where those conditions hold, idle land becomes the cheapest expansion the sector has.

Idle land is a crop the country chooses not to harvest.

The Value Problem: Processing What Is Grown

Agro-processing is where the GDP ambition is won or lost. Selling raw produce captures the thinnest slice of the value chain; milling, packing, canning and refining keep more of the final price, and the jobs that come with it, inside the country. The diamond economy taught Botswana this lesson in another commodity, and the long push to cut and polish stones at home rather than export them rough is the same argument applied to agriculture: stop exporting the value with the raw material.

Processing is also what makes the first two shifts pay. Cooperatives supply the volume a processor needs, and leased land supplies the acreage; the processor, in turn, gives the farmer a buyer worth organising for. The three moves are a system, not a menu. Build only the cooperatives and you have scale with nowhere premium to sell; build only the processing and you starve it of supply. That interdependence is what turns three pieces of advice into a strategy.

The margin lives in the processing, not the planting.

Naming agriculture as a candidate for the GDP crown is a stretch goal, and a speech at a market is the start of the work, not the proof of it. The harder questions of finance, water security, extension support and route to market all sit behind the three shifts the minister named. But the direction is coherent: organise to gain scale, lease to use the land, process to keep the value. For Botswana operators, the practical reading is that the opportunity is in the connective tissue between farm and shelf, where the country currently captures the least and could capture the most.

Sources: allAfrica