ABSTRACT
Rising agricultural productivity in developing societies involves class formation among the peasantry, and requires for its greater success broad and active support from the state which itself grows stronger in the process. The formation of middle and rich peasantries and, recently, of smaller black rural capitalist classes of large-scale farmers, accompanied the growth of commercial agriculture in the region: in Zimbabwe slowly from the 1930s (and briefly earlier); intermittendy in Zambia, then more steadily from the 1950s; and in Malawi mainly after independence in 1964.Rising agricultural productivities represent a basic national resource: the achievement of food self-sufficiency; an export capacity earning revenue and foreign exchange; the basis for economic development and diversification; and a source of an investment surplus for the strengthening of the state. It also constitutes a lever for social and economic transformation in the long term, when established productivities provide a firm base for redistribution and greater equality. Zimbabwe, and even Malawi, much the smallest of the three, differ markedly from Zambia in the achievement of increased productivities. Banda’s autocratic state has produced rapid economic development based chiefly on support for large-scale capitalist farming and the state-organised supply of cheap peasant labour. In Zimbabwe settler colonialism constructed a relatively advanced, integrated, and diversified economy out of the heavy exploitation of peasant land and labour, to the particular advantage of large-scale white farmers. But in Zambia a disinterested colonial and independent state produced no notable advances in agriculture in its long concentration upon the mining and urban sectors. The deepening impoverishment of
the poor peasantry is not ameliorated by a growing capacity for possible structural change in the future. With abundant untouched land in the country and with labour that is unutilised in fanning, the Zambian poor peasantry is the most abandoned of the region, if not its most exploited.The formation of rich rural classes in peasant societies offers a smaller contribution to agricultural development if the state is inactive in the sector, as Zambia before and after 1964 generally indicates. But the struggles of rising indigenous farmers in the region over decades against colonial systems which favoured large-scale white-owned agriculture, constituted limited but significant economic gains. Though a racially biased interventionist state was particularly strong in Zimbabwe, weaker in Zambia, rich peasantries nevertheless actively arose in both countries under colonialism. Colonial opposition to peasant agriculture meant, however, that a true articulation of pre-capitalist and capitalist agricultural systems, one which encouraged the dynamics and hierarchies of the old societies, hardly occurred in the region. Exceptions were perhaps the early ‘peasant prosperity’ and the interrupted development among the Tonga in southern Zambia.Despite the new inequalities which it inevitably subsumes, rural class formation is a force which can place demands on the state for investment in agricultural development. Indigenous class formation also serves to draw domestic resources out of the hands of large-scale white farmers - tasks in which a supposedly undifferentiated small peasantry faces well-nigh impossible barriers. It is also a force for economic indigenisation on a broad though long-term basis, since indigenous control over commercial agriculture is a more feasible and achievable proposition than is the case with other sectors of the domestic economy.Rising agricultural productivity and the possession of a relatively strong and activist state has placed Zimbabwe, and recently Malawi to a lesser extent, in a special position regionally and even continentally, freed from the vicious and constantly debilitating nexus between backward agriculture and a weak state. By contrast the continuance of this interconnection characterises Zambia still.But it is also significant that Zimbabwe’s agricultural productivities rest today upon a narrow and unstable social base both in class and racial terms. Around 1980 Zimbabwe’s large-scale farming sector produced almost 95 per cent of total marketed agricultural output, and contributed some 11 per cent to the country’s GDP. This sector then comprised only some 4,700 large-scale farmers (3, pp.27, 35). Next in productivity were 9,500 rich peasants (called ‘small-scale’) who are titleholders to land - averaging in 1977 123 ha and ranging in size up to a largish 800 ha - in the former Purchase Areas, with further unenumerated sections located
in the so-called communal lands and the new setdement schemes. The productivity of these 9,500 established rich peasants was on average some thirty times greater than that of the peasantries in the backward communal lands totalling between 650,000 and 850,000 households (3, P-31; 4, p .ll) .There are indications that the social base of Malawi’s agricultural achievements is narrower still at its topmost level. In 1971 there were only about 104 large-scale farm units. Near the end of the decade there were in addition some 100,000 achikumbe (‘progressive farmers’) or middle-to-rich peasants (7, pp.79, 81). Other instabilities in the two countries turned on the fact that the majority of producers in the large-scale sectors were white or other foreign owners - probably less so in Malawi than Zimbabwe - with an inherent and serious impermanency in their positions. Since both countries also experience today critical shortages of good land, the maintenance of their productivities in the future is affected by deep uncertainties.
