• Zambia's projected maize exports of 2.49 million metric tonnes exceed Zimbabwe's entire harvest of 2.35 million metric tonnes
• Zimbabwe's Pfumvudza precision agriculture programme is designed for household food security, not commercial surplus generation, which explains why the same La Niña rainfall season gave Zambia a more surplus above Zimbabwe
• Zambia enters the 2026/27 season, which its own climate forecasters have flagged as carrying above-average drought risk, with 6.7 million tonnes of total maize availability and a fully stocked strategic reserve of 1 million tonnes

Harare- Zambia’s 2025/26 maize season has produced a number so large it requires a reference point to make sense. The country’s Crop Forecasting Survey, released by ZAMSTAT Statistician General Sheila Mudenda on 27 May 2026, projected total maize production of 4,937,605 metric tonnes, the highest ever recorded in Zambia’s agricultural history. The surplus above national grain requirements stands at 1.48 million metric tonnes.

However, Zambia's projected commercial maize export programme for 2025/26 stands at 2.49 million metric tonnes. Zimbabwe's entire 2025/26 maize harvest is 2.35 million metric tonnes. What Zambia plans to sell abroad, the grain remaining after feeding its own population of approximately 20 million people, is larger than everything Zimbabwe produced this season across all its provinces combined. Zimbabwe enters the same marketing year with no meaningful carryover from last season, its strategic reserve having been drawn down during the 2023/24 El Niño disaster.

That single figure, the surplus alone, exceeds Zimbabwe’s projected entire 2025/26 maize harvest of 2.35 million metric tonnes. These are figures of a country at a fundamentally different point in its agricultural development trajectory.

The comparison between Zambia's Farmer Input Support Programme and Zimbabwe's Pfumvudza/Intwasa programme and Presidential Input Scheme illuminates a fundamental difference in policy architecture that explains a significant portion of the output gap between the two countries. Zambia's FISP is designed explicitly for area expansion: it subsidises seed and fertiliser quantities sufficient to plant and maintain a commercially meaningful acreage per beneficiary household, enabling each farmer to cultivate land at a scale that generates marketed surplus above household consumption. The programme supports broad cultivation across Zambia's 41.7 million hectares of agricultural land, and its results are reflected in the 94% smallholder contribution to the record harvest.

Zimbabwe's Pfumvudza/Intwasa is designed on a categorically different principle: precision conservation agriculture applied to small, intensively managed planting basins of approximately 0.1 hectares per plot. The programme is explicitly designed to produce food security at the household level through input efficiency on minimal land, concentrating fertiliser and seed on a small area to maximise yield per unit of input for subsistence farmers. That design is analytically correct for its stated purpose. It is not, and was never intended to be, an instrument for generating national maize surpluses at commercial scale.

A Zimbabwean smallholder following the Pfumvudza methodology on a precision basin plot produces significantly more food per input dollar than conventional broadcasting methods. They do not produce more food in aggregate volume than a Zambian smallholder cultivating three to five hectares under FISP subsidy. Zimbabwe's Presidential Input Scheme similarly prioritises vulnerable household food security over commercial output expansion.

The policy choice embedded in both programmes is a welfare-first rather than a production-first architecture, and while it has genuinely reduced hunger at the household level, it structurally limits the aggregate tonnage that Zimbabwe's smallholder base can produce regardless of how good the rainfall is. Closing the output gap with Zambia requires not merely continuing the precision agriculture approach but adding to it a commercially-oriented area expansion programme that incentivises smallholders to cultivate a larger proportion of their available land rather than intensifying production on a small fraction of it.

On the other hand, Zmbabwe, which grew its GDP by 7.5% in 2025 against Zambia’s 4.6%, has a larger economy in dollar terms, a more diversified mineral export base, a dominant tobacco industry generating over a billion dollars annually, and a gold sector producing record output at historic prices. In virtually every economic dimension except agriculture, Zimbabwe’s recent performance outpaces Zambia’s, but in maize, the continent’s primary food staple and the crop that underpins rural food security for the majority of both countries’ populations, Zambia has built something Zimbabwe has not: agricultural scale.

Understanding why, and what it means for regional food security, is the most important agricultural economics question in southern Africa in 2026.

Zambia vs Zimbabwe:The Scale Comparison (Confirmed published figures, 2025/26 season)

Source: ZAMSTAT Crop Forecasting Survey, 27 May 2026; Zimbabwe post-cabinet briefing, 22 April 2026; World Bank GDP data; ECOFIN Agency trade analysis

Zambia’s 4.94 million tonne harvest did not emerge from nowhere. It is the product of a specific policy architecture that has been constructed, with varying degrees of consistency, over the past decade. The Farmer Input Support Programme, through which the government subsidises seed and fertiliser for smallholder farmers, reaches hundreds of thousands of households each season. The Comprehensive Agriculture Transformation Support Programme and the Eighth National Development Plan have channelled investment into agricultural extension, irrigation infrastructure, and rural road networks that connect smallholders to output markets. Cabinet Secretary Patrick Kangwa credited these interventions directly alongside the favourable La Niña rainfall when announcing the harvest results.

The smallholder sector’s contribution to the record harvest is the most analytically significant structural feature. Small and medium-scale farmers are expected to contribute 94% of the total maize production, which means Zambia’s agricultural record is not the achievement of a handful of large commercial farms, but distributed across hundreds of thousands of rural households. That distribution is both the strength and the vulnerability of the system. When the rainfall is good, as it has been under La Niña, the smallholder base produces at extraordinary scale. When it fails, as it did in 2023/24, the same distributed base collapses simultaneously and the country swings from surplus to deficit in a single season.

Zimbabwe’s agricultural structure differs from Zambia’s in ways that partly explain the output gap. The land reform programme that began in 2000 redistributed approximately 11 million hectares from large commercial farms to smallholders and new resettlement farmers, but without the institutional support, capital, and technical knowledge that the displaced commercial farmers had brought to the land. Communal and resettlement farmers dominate Zimbabwe’s maize production, as in Zambia, but Zimbabwe’s supporting infrastructure of input supply, credit, extension services, and market linkages has been slower to rebuild than the land redistribution was to execute. 

 Zambia’s National Food Balance Sheet 2026/27 Season (ZAMSTAT published figures)

Source: ZAMSTAT Statistician General Sheila Mudenda, National Food Balance presentation, 27 May 2026; Zambia Monitor. All figures from the official 2025/26 Ministry of Agriculture and ZAMSTAT Crop Forecasting Survey.

Zambia’s projected 2.49 million metric tonne commercial maize export programme is an ambition of a different order from anything the country has previously attempted. Total maize exports by SADC member states excluding Zambia reached 3.56 million tonnes worth USD 1.13 billion in 2025, meaning the regional demand base exists to absorb the volumes Zambia is targeting. The DRC, which shares a long border with Zambia and whose eastern provinces are chronically food-deficit, has historically been the largest single destination for Zambian maize flows, both formal and informal. Malawi, which imports maize from Zambia in most seasons, absorbs significant additional volume. The USDA projects Zambian maize exports to Malawi alone at up to 400,000 tonnes through formal and informal channels.

But a bumper harvest does not automatically become export earnings. Zambia’s agricultural trade history is littered with seasons in which large surpluses failed to translate into proportionate export revenue because of factors that had nothing to do with how much maize was in the silos. Export bans and restrictions may appear to keep food at home, but they also depress farmgate prices, discourage future production, damage trader confidence and weaken regional trust. Farmers respond to price signals. If they believe that surplus production may be trapped in the domestic market, they plant less next season.

Zambia has imposed export bans in prior surplus seasons. The institutional memory of regional buyers reflects that history. Buyers in the DRC, Malawi, Zimbabwe, or the wider region ask whether Zambia can supply consistently, whether contracts will be honoured, whether export permits will be issued on time, and whether policies will change suddenly after traders have already committed capital.

The kwacha is the other export constraint that the bumper harvest cannot resolve. Zambia’s currency appreciated 21% against the US dollar in H1 2026, earning the distinction of the world’s best-performing currency in January. For a farmer selling maize domestically in kwacha, a stronger currency is neutral. For Zambia as a maize exporter competing against South Africa and, in some seasons, Ukraine and South America on international markets where pricing is dollar-denominated, a stronger kwacha means Zambian maize is structurally more expensive than it was twelve months ago. South African maize, priced in rands that have not appreciated as dramatically, is more competitive in regional export markets than the nominal production gap between the two countries might suggest.

  Zambia’s Maize Export Potential: The Trade Predictability Problem

Source: ANAPRI agricultural trade dialogue analysis; ZAMSTAT 2026; FEWS NET regional market analysis; ECOFIN Agency; USDA Zambia maize trade projections. Policy history references from multiple seasons of FRA intervention documentation.

For Zimbabwe, Zambia’s record harvest has implications that cut in multiple directions. The most immediate is competitive. Zimbabwe’s tobacco earns dollars. Its gold earns dollars. Its maize, in a surplus year, would need to compete in regional markets against Zambian grain that is available in volumes that dwarf what Zimbabwe can offer. Zimbabwe is not a maize exporter and is unlikely to become one in the near term, which means the surplus it has produced in 2025/26 will be absorbed domestically and by GMB reserve replenishment rather than sold regionally. The competitive pressure from Zambia falls not on Zimbabwe’s export earnings but on the price at which Zimbabwe can import supplementary maize in any future deficit year. With Zambia holding 6.7 million tonnes of total maize availability and a Food Reserve Agency strategic reserve of 1 million tonnes, regional maize prices will face sustained downward pressure through the 2026/27 marketing year. That is a benefit to Zimbabwe as a potential future importer, not a threat.

The more structural implication for Zimbabwe is the demonstration effect of what agricultural investment at scale can produce. Zambia’s 4.94 million tonne harvest on a GDP of USD 32 billion compares with Zimbabwe’s 2.35 million tonne harvest on a GDP of USD 56 billion. Zimbabwe has a larger economy, a more sophisticated financial sector, a higher-value mineral export portfolio, and a more diverse industrial base. But Zambia is producing 2.1 times Zimbabwe’s maize crop, and its food security position going into 2026/27 is structurally stronger as a result. The gap is not explained by land endowment. Zambia has 41.7 million hectares of agricultural land, Zimbabwe has 20.6 million hectares. A 2:1 land ratio does not produce a 2.1:1 maize ratio by coincidence. It reflects a productivity and investment dynamic that Zimbabwe has not yet replicated.

For Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube, whose macroeconomic programme places agriculture as one of three growth pillars alongside mining and infrastructure, the Zambia comparison should be an unsettling data point. Zimbabwe’s 7.5% GDP growth in 2025 is genuinely impressive. Its tobacco revenue, gold output, and dairy recovery are real achievements. But 150,000 tonnes of maize surplus above domestic requirements, against Zambia’s 1.48 million tonne surplus, is the number that shows how far Zimbabwe’s agricultural transformation agenda still has to travel before the country can claim to have resolved its structural food security vulnerability. One good La Niña season does not. The next El Niño will test whether the improvement is structural or cyclical, and the history of both countries’ agricultural performance in drought years suggests the verdict on that question has not yet been earned.

However, both Zimbabwe’s cabinet briefing and Zambia’s ZAMSTAT presentation contain a sentence that neither government chose to emphasise in its headline communications. Zambia’s cabinet secretary noted that current meteorological projections indicate a higher likelihood of below-average rainfall during the upcoming 2026/27 farming season. Zimbabwe’s own climate projections, consistent with regional outlooks from the Southern Africa Regional Climate Outlook Forum, point in the same direction. La Niña conditions that delivered the 2025/26 bumper harvests across the region are transitioning toward neutral and potentially El Niño conditions for the next growing season.

The implications of that transition are severe for a region whose food security is almost entirely dependent on rain-fed agriculture. Given erratic rainfall, and less than 5% of cropped land under irrigation, Zambia’s maize crop fails to satisfy national market demand, on average, in 1 year out of 3. Zimbabwe’s irrigated area is expanding under a government programme targeting 496,000 hectares, but currently stands at 217,000 hectares, equally exposed to rainfall variability for the bulk of its smallholder production. The record harvests of 2025/26 are a window of opportunity to build the reserves, replenish the strategic stocks, and invest in the irrigation and climate-resilient agriculture that can reduce vulnerability in the next drought.

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