According to the World Bank, since 2005 Zambia has experienced impressive economic growth at an average of around 6-7 % per year, although this has decreased to less than 3 percent in recent years.  This decline has been driven by drought and a fall in the price of copper, one of the country’s major export products, resulting in growth rates that are slightly lower than the average of neighbouring countries. Yet over a decade of high economic growth has not translated into significant poverty reduction. Currently around 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and 42 percent are considered to live in situations of extreme poverty. Moreover, the absolute numbers of people living below the poverty line increased dramatically between 1991 and 2015 due to population growth from 6 million in 1991 to 8.4 million in 2015.

Accessing adequate and nutritious food continues to be a challenge across most of the country, with women and children in rural areas faring worst. According to the latest Demographic Health Survey conducted in 2013-2014, wasting was identified in approximately 6 per cent of children under five. With regard to small holder farmers, I observed that Zambia’s dual land tenure system lacks protections to secure their access to land and is leading to tensions. In this sense, the Government’s push to turn export-oriented commercial large-scale agricultural into a driving engine of the Zambian economy, in a situation where the protection of access to land is weak and large-scale land acquisition for commercial agriculture occur, can risk pushing peasants off their land and out of production with severe impacts on the people’s right to food.