As countries develop in the modern world, pushing up the wealth they create and distribute and seeing ever higher incomes for the average person, the percentage of the population engaged in farming tends to fall, even while farm output increases.
The main driver of this process is the need for ever more people to work in mining, industry and services, and that transforms almost every country from one where the vast majority of people worked on the land to one where farmers are a diminishing minority.
Normally this dramatic change takes place at a time of fairly high population growth, so the number of farms remains roughly the same, but each supporting fewer people and needing fewer people as mechanisation reduces labour needs while increasing productivity, output and income.
Zimbabwe is now in the midst of this process and the major reforms of the Second Republic are accelerating the changes.
The latest ZimStat sampling in the 10th round of the Rapid Poverty Income, Consumption and Expenditure Survey, conducted in August last year, shows that the percentage of Zimbabwean households reliant on farming for their primary source of income had fallen to just under 30 percent.
We need to note that ZimStat is referring to households, not individuals, and since many farming households encompass multiple generations they tend to be larger than nuclear urban households or the youth-headed businesses that are now growing up around the country.
So the percentage of the population reliant on farming will be somewhat higher than 30 percent.
The result is that farming sector is still the largest when it comes to Zimbabweans earning a living, but other sectors are growing faster in terms of households and this is both normal and an important indicator of the way the Zimbabwean economy is growing. Wage employment as the primary source of household income is rising very fast, with 22 percent of households now reliant on members having a wage, that is a reasonably formal job.
That sector is expanding very fast under the Second Republic with new mines and new factories opening frequently and older businesses growing and creating new jobs.
If present trends continue then during the next few years wage employment will overtake farming as the primary income source of a majority of households, although we need to stress that this will be happening as agriculture continues to grow. In fact a lot of the new jobs will be reliant on the rising quantities of raw materials that the farmers are producing and delivering to industry.
But farming and wage employment are only between them a little over half the total number of households. Non-farm enterprises now support 13 percent of households and that percentage is the one that is likely to grow the fastest.
These are the businesses and enterprises where people become self-employed, that is opening their own business using their own skills rather than seeking a job with someone else.
Farming is obviously the largest area of self-employment but the fact that many others are now taking advantage of the better preparation changes and upgrade in education have given them, and the more support coming from the Government, is a major advance.
While between them farming and non-farming self-employment account for more than 40 percent of all households, we are likely to see the ratio between farming and non-farming self-employment continue to skew in favour of non-farm self-employment, as well as seeing the total percentage that these two areas occupy growing.
We should note that not all non-farming self-employment is urban. A lot is rural, and to take just one example there has been increasing work for the skilled rural builders as farmers convert their tobacco, cotton and grain money into better housing.
This trend will continue with the Government keen on commercialising even the smallest farms and keen on building the rural industrial and business network.
There has been a tendency for people to regard a job as a better option than becoming self-employed, yet the income from employment is limited while there are no similar limits on what someone with a really good idea can earn.
Generally speaking the self-employed cover a huge range of people, from those just scraping by without much money at all to the richest people in any society and a wide range in between those limits.
In most societies they are dominated by the small and medium family businesses that provide so much of the national income and which support so many of the people.
These family farms and family non-farming businesses also help spread the national wealth, an import part of the development process desired by the Second Republic.
It is possible to create a country where a small percentage of the population control and enjoy most of the income, and in fact this was the society created by the colonial regimes, but while allowing the able to push ahead it is also important to make sure that the majority move up the road of increasing prosperity.
This in fact creates the markets and the production that an expanding economy needs and is thus the best way to expand the economy, as well as ensuring that everyone benefits and “no one is left behind”.
What ZimStat is now capturing is a major transformation in the Zimbabwean economy, and in many ways the picture shows that the country is accelerating its growth and with an ever wider range of human occupation and family support coming through.
