By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 20

A steep food-self-sufficiency target lands on irrigated schemes already struggling to hold the output they have.

Among NDP6’s targets, one is unusually concrete for agriculture: by 2030, Namibia intends to produce 80 percent of its own food. For a country that imports most of what it processes and eats, that is a steep line to climb, and the plan pins much of the climb on the green schemes and the technology used to run them.

The ambition lands on ground that is already under strain. Namibia’s irrigated green schemes are meant to be the backbone of domestic production, and NDP6 asks them to do more – more hectares, higher yields and better technology – at a moment when many are struggling to hold the output they have.

The eighty-percent target

The plan reports nine operational green schemes covering about 5,600 hectares, of which roughly 3,403 were under cultivation, yielding 9,947 tonnes of maize, 300 tonnes of potatoes and 39 tonnes of sunflower by mid-2025. Those are real harvests, and they are also far short of what an 80 percent self-sufficiency goal requires.

The gap is the point. Namibia’s Green Scheme policy has long aimed at roughly 22,000 hectares under irrigation along its perennial rivers, so the operational area today is a fraction of the designed capacity. Reaching the food target means both finishing the schemes and lifting the yield of each hectare already in use.

The harvest is genuine; measured against the target, it is a start rather than an achievement.

Where agritech changes the maths

Technology is how the same land is meant to produce more. Precision methods already tested on Namibian schemes – drip irrigation, soil and water monitoring, drone and satellite crop imaging – can cut water use by a third or more and raise yields by a fifth, gains that matter most on dry, expensive-to-irrigate land.

At schemes such as Ndonga Linena, growers have adopted modern pumping and monitoring to track the power and water that decide whether irrigated farming pays. NDP6’s promotion of technology-driven production reads, in practice, as a bet that better instruments can close part of the yield gap the target demands.

On arid land, the cheapest extra hectare is the one you already farm, farmed better.

The value-addition gap

Producing food is only half the goal; keeping its value is the other. Namibia imports the overwhelming majority of its processed agricultural goods, which means raw crops often leave the country to return as packaged products at higher prices. NDP6 pairs its production target with a push for local agro-processing and value addition.

For an agribusiness, that is where the opportunity concentrates. A tonne of maize milled, a crop graded and packed, a product branded at home captures margin that raw output surrenders. The plan’s food target will not be met by growing more alone if the processing continues to happen elsewhere.

Self-sufficiency counts the processing plant as much as the field.

The delivery constraints

The honest reading is that green schemes carry a history of under-investment and difficult economics, and technology does not erase them. Equipment ages, power and water cost money, and a scheme run poorly can lose more than a well-managed rain-fed farm. State support since 2020 has gone into replacing kit precisely because the base had decayed.

For a farmer, an investor or an equipment supplier, that is the field NDP6 opens. The target is fixed and the tools exist, but reaching 80 percent depends on management, maintenance and finance reaching the schemes at the same time as the technology.

Agritech lifts a scheme that is run well and cannot rescue one that is not.

For an agribusiness, an equipment supplier or a lender to farmers, NDP6 sets a clear and demanding marker: an eighty-percent food target that the green schemes, as they stand, cannot yet meet. The decision each faces is whether to put capital and technology into those schemes now, on the plan’s promise, or to wait until the schemes prove they can turn the tools into the harvest the target needs.

Sources: The Namibian; Namibia’s precision farming in the Kavango green schemes (Farmonaut); Green Scheme programme (Agribank)