It’s no big secret that agriculture is vital to the economies of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, accounting for 10% of their GDP.
But what is most disturbing is that some countries are responding to the various headwinds they face — some of their own making — by looking to restrict trade within the region.
The problems are well known. And it starts with weak land governance.
Informal land tenure, a feature of most farming in the region, means agribusinesses tend to be reluctant to invest at scale. This affects output, since smallholder farmers aren’t typically the most productive.
Then there’s the infrastructure issue. You can hardly develop solid agricultural supply chains if your roads are poor. Farming is, after all, about buying and selling perishable products.
What all this suggests is that SADC needs an increase, not a decrease, in regional trade, since you’re not going to improve production without new markets.
Instead, what we’ve seen is trade friction in the region. Namibia, Botswana and, more recently, Mozambique, have all said they plan to limit imports of vegetables and fruit from South Africa.
This appears to contradict the commitment by SADC to create a free trade area in the 16-country bloc. As it is, five of those countries — Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa — are members of the Southern African Customs Union (Sacu), which is supposed to facilitate the free movement of goods.
In theory, these deals should smooth the way for a flow of goods between the countries. In practice, farming products haven’t benefited as you’d expect. And tensions, as a result, have only grown.
There are three reasons why these agricultural flows are so uneven.
First, there’s the issue of size. Trade flows vary according to how influential a country is. South Africa, for instance, has a large food market, spending more than $7bn annually on imports. Yet Eswatini imported only $806m of agricultural products in 2025.
And this mismatch extends to exports too. South Africa accounts for more than half of SADC’s agricultural exports to the world market, followed by Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique.
Other countries don’t like this uneven picture.
Second, there’s the discrepancy between phytosanitary rules.
Last year, for instance, Tanzania banned imports of agricultural products from South Africa in retaliation for that country’s decision to ban imports of Tanzanian bananas. South Africa’s government denied there was any such ban, saying the whole thing was a miscommunication, and rather about noncompliance with standards.
This fracas showed how sensitivity around these phytosanitary rules can be used as a tool to block imports.
Third, there is a more practical problem of low agricultural output in some countries.
Consider maize, a staple grain in Southern Africa. The yield has been stagnant for the past three decades, at about 1t per hectare. Yet in South Africa, it’s about 6t per hectare, due to differences and continuous improvement in seed cultivars.
It is because of these productivity differences that most SADC members — including Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique — import more than they can export.
For some countries, the solution to this import-export imbalance lies in boosting local production by restricting imports. Only, Botswana and Namibia, for example, say they can’t do this because of how reliant they are on imports from South Africa.
Structural imbalance
All these arguments are compelling. But to lay the problems of trade expansion at South Africa’s door, particularly by slapping trade bans on the larger country, helps nobody. It also flies against the spirit of SADC and Sacu, both of which prioritise free trade.
Added to that is the fact that countries in the region have been slow to grow their exports to South Africa. They simply don’t have surpluses of the agricultural products South Africa needs: wheat, rice, palm oil, poultry products and whiskies, among others.
But the issue is how to fix the failure to deepen intra-regional trade.
Unchecked, it creates huge risk for new entrant farmers, who need access to markets to grow and sustain their farming operations.
There are solutions at hand. The obvious one is for SADC countries to focus on producing what they can trade within the region, and sell the rest to world markets. Reform of land governance and investment in infrastructure will also go a long way.
But the dominance of countries such as South Africa is a problem and to mitigate this, member states must collaborate on farm inputs and knowledge exchange. This is the only way: turning to unjustified import restrictions will do more harm than good.
