IN this week’s edition we talk of the importance of the smallholder farmer.
The smallholder farmer is not just part of Zimbabwe’s economic equation; they are the very foundation of it. It is true that scale does not equal significance, and that sustainable transformation often starts at the grassroots.
Tajikistan may seem far from the villages of Mhondoro, Mutoko, or Binga, but the lessons drawn from its smallholder agricultural success are profoundly relevant. Prosperity is not about grand infrastructure or multi-million-dollar projects alone. Sometimes, it’s about simplicity done well, community-run cooperatives, locally maintained machinery, and low-cost, high-output solutions that respond directly to real, daily needs.
The image of a five-tonne-per-day rice milling machine, operating quietly and efficiently in a rural Tajik community, is more than an anecdote. It challenges us to reassess what progress can look like. It invites us to replace our obsession with scale and spectacle with an appreciation for impact and intention. Most importantly, it urges us to empower those who have always tilled our soil, stored our grain and fed our nation the rural farmers.
Our future will not be built in boardrooms alone. It will be shaped in the fields, by our small-scale farmers, at the village grain mills. Sustainable development must speak to these spaces, must prioritize smallholder empowerment not as a developmental add-on, but as a national strategy.
We must reframe the rural farmer not as a passive recipient of aid or a peripheral figure in the economy but as an active, capable agent of change. When given access to appropriate technologies, cooperative structures and local processing capabilities, rural communities can and will transform themselves. They do not need charity. They need trust. They need partnership. They need systems designed around their reality.
It is time for a cultural shift in how we measure development. We must move beyond GDP and begin to value the quality of rural roads, the availability of irrigation, the functionality of storage facilities, and the productivity of communal lands. These are the real indicators of inclusive progress. The farmer in Binga, the cooperative in Honde Valley, the community granary in Chiredzi, these must become the measure of progress.
This is a challenge to our policymakers, technocrats, and financiers: are we willing to back local solutions? Are we willing to fund small-scale innovations that work, instead of being dazzled by expensive imports that don’t fit our context? Tajikistan’s model proves that belief in grassroots systems, combined with strategic coordination and appropriate technologies, can lift entire communities out of poverty.
Rural potential should not be an afterthought but a cornerstone. The future lies in villages that are economically viable, agriculturally vibrant and socially cohesive.