By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 03
Namibia grows too little of what it eats. The new board's sector-promotion brief now includes helping to close that gap.
For all its scale, Namibia imports much of what fills its plates, and its farmers wrestle drought on some of the driest farmland in the region. Into that picture steps the new investment board, whose brief to promote priority sectors and coordinate projects now reaches into agriculture.
The question the board raises for farming is whether a single, senior interface can pull investment toward the parts of the food chain that add value at home – the irrigation, the processing and the technology – rather than leaving the country to grow raw and buy finished.
A sector built for value addition
Agriculture is modest in Namibia’s output, contributing roughly four per cent of gross domestic product, yet it employs a large share of households and anchors the rural economy. That mismatch is the opportunity: the room to grow lies less in raw tonnage than in value addition – cleaning, packing, processing and branding produce that currently leaves the farm unfinished or arrives from abroad.
A board that markets agriculture as a priority sector can point investors at exactly those links. Its usefulness is in coordination, lining up land, water rights, off-take and support around a processing project rather than leaving each investor to assemble them alone.
The margin in Namibian food is in the finishing, not the harvesting.
Building on the Green Scheme
The state has tried to grow irrigated production before. The Green Scheme, implemented through the AgriBusDev company, established eleven irrigation projects across the country to lift agronomic output and cut the import bill. The results have been uneven, which is a warning as much as a foundation for the board to read closely.
A promotion board changes the actor, not the crop. Where the Green Scheme leaned on state delivery, the board can court private and technical partners to run, expand or supply those schemes, bringing management and capital that public agencies have struggled to sustain.
The infrastructure exists; what it has lacked is durable private capacity.
Where agritech earns its place
Namibia’s conditions make technology less a luxury than a survival tool. Drip irrigation, soil and water sensing, drought-tolerant varieties and cold-chain logistics all decide whether horticulture pays in a country this dry. Promoting agriculture without promoting the technology that makes it viable would miss the point entirely.
This is where a coordinating board can add real value, matching agritech suppliers to Green Scheme projects and horticulture clusters, and treating innovation as part of the investment offer rather than an afterthought bolted on once the borehole is dug.
In a dry country, agritech is not an upgrade to farming; it is the condition for it.
The coordination test
The measure of success is whether more of the food chain, from field to plate, ends up sited in Namibia. Horticulture value chains, local processing and youth employment in agribusiness are the concrete targets, and they need land, finance and buyers joined up rather than pursued in isolation.
The risk is that agriculture, unglamorous beside mining or tourism, slips down the board’s priority list. A sector that needs patient coordination can lose out to deals that promise faster headlines.
Agriculture will test whether the board can back the slow sector, not just the shiny one.
For an agribusiness, an agritech supplier or a development financier, the board’s creation is an invitation to treat Namibian agriculture as an investment case rather than a subsidy line. The decision it poses is whether to bring the processing, the irrigation technology and the off-take now, while the board is choosing which sectors to champion, and to help make food one of the industries it decides to back.
Sources: The Namibian; Agriculture Sector (Ministry of Industrialisation and Trade); Call for more investment in agriculture (The Namibian)
