By Etuna Hango
I have spent my career assessing where capital should go in emerging markets, and I keep returning to the same conclusion: we consistently underprice agriculture.
Every major civilisation in human history was built on agriculture before it built anything else.
Long before nations industrialised or built financial systems, they established productive agricultural bases capable of sustaining population growth and generating trade surpluses.
Yet in most investment conversations I sit in, agriculture is treated as a secondary sector: socially important, but strategically subordinate to mining, technology, finance, or industrial development. History says otherwise.
The historical foundations of agricultural economies
Yuval Noah Harari (2014) makes this point in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The shift from hunter-gathering to settled farming roughly 12,000 years ago altered the trajectory of human civilisation: people settled, populations grew, work specialised, and trade and government took shape.
Harari calls the Agricultural Revolution “history’s biggest fraud” because early farmers worked harder than the foragers who preceded them, yet he concedes that it created the conditions for civilisation itself.
The same pattern shows up in modern development, particularly in Africa. Most industrial economies did not industrialise in isolation from agriculture.
Farm productivity usually came first and paid for what followed. Johnston and Mellor (1961) argued that agriculture plays a central role in supplying labour, capital, food, foreign exchange, and domestic demand during early-stage development. In most developing economies, agriculture is the foundation the rest of the economy is built on.
Countries that try to industrialise without first strengthening agriculture struggle to generate broad-based growth: poverty persists, rural economies stagnate, and local industries lack domestic supply chains to build on.
Namibia’s agricultural economy in context
Namibia is known for mining and is now drawing attention for its energy potential after recent oil and gas discoveries and rising renewable investment.
Yet agriculture remains one of its most economically and socially important industries, despite a modest direct contribution to GDP.
The official figures are worth comparing. Agriculture, forestry and fishing contributed 7.6% of Namibia’s GDP in 2023, compared with 15.3% from mining and quarrying (Namibia Statistics Agency [NSA], 2026).
The employment picture is very different. According to the 2023 Population and Housing Census Labour Force Report, agriculture, forestry and fishing accounted for 16.1% of total employment, or 88,277 workers, while mining and quarrying accounted for just 2.6%, or 14,337 workers, with agriculture alone accounting for 34.0% of rural employment (NSA, 2025a).
Even that understates agriculture’s importance to household livelihoods, because the current labour statistics methodology does not classify people producing food mainly for their own household consumption as employed: the 2023 Census identified 554,270 working-age Namibians as subsistence or own-use food producers, equal to 29.5% of the working-age population and more than 90% of them rural (NSA, 2025a), alongside 261,024 households engaged in crop or livestock farming (NSA, 2024).
Mining therefore makes a much larger contribution to GDP, but agriculture reaches far more workers and households, particularly in rural Namibia, which helps explain why growth in agriculture can have a stronger effect on household incomes and poverty.
World Bank research has found agricultural growth to be 2-3x more effective at reducing poverty than equivalent growth in other sectors (Christiaensen & Martin, 2018; World Bank,n.d.), while Dorosh and Thurlow (2018) found similarly strong poverty-reduction effects from agricultural growth across five African economies.
Agriculture also sits at the centre of long value chains. Livestock supports logistics, veterinary services, cold storage, abattoirs, exporters, and feed suppliers; irrigation creates demand for engineering, energy, water management, packaging, and processing; poultry stimulates feed milling, warehousing, and distribution.
Those linkages employ more people than the farms themselves, and the same sequence holds more broadly: farm surpluses are what have historically funded urbanisation and industrial investment (Timmer, 1988), and many of today’s most industrially advanced economies modernized agriculture long before industrialisation accelerated.
I think the Namibian opportunity is large mainly because the sector is underinvested relative to its importance.
Agriculture is long-duration by nature, and in Namibia it is also water-constrained: this is the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa, and only about 2% of its land receives enough rainfall for reliable cropping (FAO, n.d.), which makes irrigation the single biggest determinant of whether a project works.
An orchard takes years to bear fruit and a breeding programme takes longer. Both need capital upfront and an investor willing to wait. Conventional financing rarely fits that profile, particularly where agricultural risk is priced as high.
The investment case for Namibian agriculture
Globally, private equity has moved into agriculture on the back of food security and supply chain worries. Within Africa specifically, the investment case extends beyond financial returns alone.
Agricultural investment can create jobs, substitute imports, grow exports, and pull rural households into the formal economy at the same time (Diao, Hazell, & Thurlow, 2010). I can think of few other sectors that do all of that at once.
My own view, formed through investing into these assets, is straightforward: sectors that produce food, strengthen domestic supply chains, and expand rural productive capacity should be treated as investable economic infrastructure.
That takes, in addition to capital, people on the ground, infrastructure spend, someone who has scaled a farming business before, and the patience to wait out a production cycle.
GDP share, the metric that makes agriculture look small, also misses a resilience argument.
The pandemic, the inflation that followed it, and the geopolitics since have all shown what happens without domestic productive capacity. Countries that cannot feed themselves are exposed in ways that are easy to ignore when times are good.
Food security is a resilience question as much as an economic one, and Namibia is exposed.
Cereals are the country’s largest food import category, with N$862.9 million of cereal grain imported in a single recent quarter, about 61% of it from South Africa (NSA, 2025b).
Namibia already has several structural advantages on which to build. It is the only African country with simultaneous beef export access to the United States, China, Norway and the European Union, a position built over decades of strong veterinary controls and production standards. Beef export earnings exceeded N$2.1 billion in 2025 (Namibia
Today, 2026). This market access is supported by political stability and significant underutilised productive capacity.
The next opportunity is to capture more value locally through processing, packaging, branding and manufacturing, rather than exporting predominantly primary agricultural products.
Expanding agricultural production and increasing domestic value addition are both stated government priorities.
Harari’s point is about scale. Farming let humans organise themselves in the thousands, and then in the millions. I am not arguing that agriculture alone will solve Namibia’s economic challenges. No single sector can.
But countries that neglect agriculture tend to weaken the foundations the rest of their growth rests on.
Civilisations were first built on agricultural surpluses long before they were built on industry or finance. Namibia is unlikely to be an exception.
*Etuna is an investment professional specialising in private equity and real-asset development across emerging markets. His work centres on deploying capital into high impact sectors, shaping investment strategy and evaluating policy environments that influence long-term economic outcomes.
