Agricultural economy & structure

Real value added in agriculture, forestry and fishing fell by 10.6% in 2022, 20.5% in 2023 and 9.2% in 2024, and then grew by 35.3% in 2025, while GDP grew by 3.8% in 2024 and 5.4% in 2025¹². Large swings are typical. Agricultural output also fell by 21.2% in 2018 and rose by 17.2% in 2020, in line with the harvest¹. In the second quarter of 2026 the sector grew by 26.5% on a year earlier and accounted for 5.7% of quarterly GDP².

At current prices agriculture's share of GDP fell from 9.4% in 2010 to 2.2% in 2023 and recovered to 4.4% in 2025¹. Part of the low share reflects measurement. The 2010 rebasing lowered agriculture's estimated value added for 2010 by 38.6% and its share from 20.1% to 9.9%³. ZamStats plans to publish GDP on a 2023 base in the fourth quarter of 2026, which will revise these series⁴. Forestry, logging and fishing account for a growing part of the total, K11.8 billion of the K35.2 billion in 2025, and forestry dominates the Copperbelt's agricultural value added¹⁵.

In dollar terms value added has followed the exchange rate. On World Bank data it fell from US$2.38 billion in 2012 to US$0.54 billion in 2020 and was US$1.19 billion in 2025, while the kwacha's annual average moved from 5.15 to 25.28 per US dollar between 2012 and 2025⁶⁷.

The 2022 census counted 2,692,471 agricultural households, 65.9% of all households, up from 61.3% in 2010, and 782,445 of them lived in urban areas²¹²². Employment statistics give a narrower picture. Since 2017 the Labour Force Survey has counted only work for pay or profit, so most subsistence farmers are outside employment, and agriculture accounted for between 22.0% and 28.0% of the employed in 2017–2024²³¹⁶. The ILO's modelled estimate, which covers all farm work, was 54.5% in 2025²⁴. Informal employment was 71.2% in 2024¹⁶.

Poverty is concentrated in farming households. The Living Conditions Monitoring Survey put the national poverty rate at 60.0% in 2022, against 54.4% in 2015 (imputed comparison), with 78.8% in rural areas and 81.0% among people in small-scale agricultural households²⁵²⁶.

Zambian agriculture has two segments. Small and medium-scale farms, which the Crop Forecast Survey covers by household sample, produced 94% of the maize forecast for 2025/26, while wheat, grown under irrigation, comes almost entirely from large-scale farms³³³⁴. The 2019 Rural Agricultural Livelihoods Survey counted 1,643,314 smallholder households, which cultivated an average of 2.43 hectares of their own fields, and 16.0% of them received a loan³⁵. The 2024 Integrated Agriculture Survey counted 2,143,475 agricultural households. In 2023/24, 72.6% of small and medium-scale households applied fertiliser and 75.7% of household heads had received no agricultural training³⁶³⁷.

Agricultural land is large relative to cropped area. Agricultural land covered 238,400 km² in 2024, 32.1% of the land area, of which 38,000 km² was arable, and forest covered 60.5%³⁸³⁹. The Lands Act of 1995 vests all land in the President, recognises customary tenure and allows customary land to be converted into leasehold⁴⁰.