Customary land is the foundation of smallholder agriculture in Zambia. In recent decades much of this land has under gone significant change as the result of population pressures, land alienation, infrastructure investments, and climate change. Despite these changes, knowledge about both the quantity of customary land and the quality of this land for agricultural commercialization purposes is scant.

This article examines the impact of the land reforms undertaken in Zambia and Zimbabwe on agricultural development. The Zambian land reform of 1995 has led to significant improvements in agricultural productivity and output since the early 2000s, allowing for a rising GDP and hopes that such growth will be redistributed across the education and health sector.

In the name of development, governments in southern Africa are reformulating land policies to facilitate privatisation of customary land rights. It is argued that this can stimulate land markets, (foreign) private investment, access to formal credit, and enhance security of tenure (by way of holding title), thereby leading to economic growth and poverty alleviation.

The paper shows that pre-colonial ecologies of agricultural systems in some parts of rural Zambia were sustainable and resilient to prevailing environmental conditions, and were therefore able to ensure relative food security, under communal land tenure. However, colonial policies of land alienation and labour migration impacted negatively on food production systems of some ethnic groups like the citemene system of the Bemba and the flood plain cultivation system of the Lozi, making them extremely vulnerable due to the absence of large numbers of males.