Source: The Zambian dynamic computable general equilibrium model results. Note: CAADP = Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme. MDG = Millennium Development Goal.
declines from 77.6 to 71.5 percent during the same period. Zambia must therefore accelerate growth and poverty reduction, especially in rural areas, if the country is to come close to achieving the fi rst Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving its 1991 poverty rate by 2015.
Accelerated Growth Scenarios
Impacts on Agricultural and National Growth The 2.5 percent agricultural growth rate in the baseline suggests that reaching and sustaining the 6 percent growth target committed to under the CAADP will pose a major challenge for Zambia. Together with the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, we designed an accelerated growth scenario for Zambia so as to iden- tify the yield gains that would be needed to achieve the CAADP objective. Additional growth was modeled through productivity improvements. For crops, this modeling involved increasing yields to achieve a reasonable reduction in the gap between cur- rent and potential yields by 2015. Maximum potential yields for different parts of the country are shown in Table 11.4 and were taken from fi eld trials made by Zambia’s Agricultural Research Institute (Zambia, MACO 2007b). Although these potential yields may be achievable for some farmers in favorable agroecological zones, it is unrealistic to expect that the full yield gap will be closed