Globally, agriculture stands at a critical crossroads.
While ongoing discussions continue to emphasise productivity, infrastructure, investment, market access, technological innovation, climate-smart agriculture, sustainable intensification, better practices and value chain development, these interventions alone will not deliver long-term regeneration.
The future of agriculture depends on a shift from addressing symptoms to addressing the root cause of environmental degradation, economic instability, and social decline.
This article demonstrates that agriculture will not become regenerative until policies and practices are grounded in biological sciences and soil health, instead of chemistry and mechanisation, and supported by a management framework capable of successfully addressing the complexity of human societies, economies and nature.
By aligning environmental health with economic prosperity and social stability, Zimbabwe has the opportunity to lead the world in the first truly regenerative agricultural policy.
The Holistic Management Framework provides a practical and scientifically grounded pathway for achieving this transformation.
OBJECTIVES
This article aims to:
- Explore the foundational principles required for a regenerative agricultural future.
- Highlight the limitations and consequences of our current reductionist agricultural policies.
- Emphasise the importance of soil health and biological sciences in national social and economic stability.
- Present Holistic Management as a framework for managing complexity.
- Offer recommendations for policymakers, practitioners, and institutions in Zimbabwe.
INTRODUCTION
By far the biggest driver of global environmental collapse is agriculture, which has become the most destructive, extractive industry on the planet.
Agriculture encompasses the production of all food and fibre from the world's land and waters – it involves billions of people, all economies, a huge percentage of our land and waters, and countless species of plants and animals – crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries and wildlife are all involved.
It is the foundation of civilisation – the fate of all civilisations follows the fate of agriculture. If we are to secure our future, agriculture must become regenerative.
Despite advances in technology and science, agricultural policies and practices worldwide continue to be the biggest contributors to soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and economic instability. This pattern reflects not a lack of knowledge, research, better practices, or innovation, but our failure to effectively manage the complexity of human societies and our life-supporting environment.
To secure our future, the conversation must move beyond productivity and modernisation toward regeneration, ecological literacy, and effective management in our biologically complex world.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT: AGRICULTURE AND CIVILISATIONAL STABILITY
History demonstrates that agricultural policies have temporarily sustained and then collapsed many civilisations. From Mesopotamia and ancient Greece to the Roman Empire and the Dust Bowl of the United States, societies collapse when ecological limits are ignored.
If the same management paradigm continues to determine agricultural policy development, the same outcomes are inevitable, but this time on a global scale.
As Einstein warned us:
‘The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.’
The urgency of this challenge was recognised at Zimbabwe’s independence. In 1980, Robert Mugabe appealed to scientists for solutions:
‘We have no greater problem than our rising population and our deteriorating environment. We politicians do not know what to do. We can only take the advice of our professional advisors, but when things go wrong, we get the blame and never our advisors.’
More than four decades later, these words remain strikingly relevant, underscoring the need for sound scientific guidance and an effective framework for managing complexity.
AGRICULTURE AS A BIOLOGICAL WHOLE
All agriculture is biological, involving inseparable social, economic, and environmental complexity – the survival of everything on Earth depends on the healthy functioning of these four ecosystem processes:
- Water Cycle
- Mineral Cycle
- Biological Community Dynamics (Biodiversity)
- Energy Cycle
All civilisation ultimately relies upon the biological sciences that sustain these four processes of nature. Yet agricultural policies have been short-sighted and dangerously based on chemistry, mechanisation, and short-term productivity over long-term social, economic, and ecological health.
What Zimbabwe's maize import ban means for South Africa
No known policy in the world is based on the fact that the social and economic stability of a country is entirely dependent on environmental health.
BEYOND PRACTICES: THE IMPORTANCE OF MANAGEMENT
As regenerative agriculture gains global recognition, attention has focused primarily on changing practices such as agroforestry, conservation agriculture, no-till, and organic farming. But these approaches address symptoms rather than root cause.
The fundamental cause of our escalating problems lies in our management.
What Do We Manage?
Humans only manage three things:
- Ourselves
- Our economies
- Our environment
Through people managing economies, we use nature to produce everything.
While we are experiencing rapid advances and success in things we manufacture and produce, we are simultaneously witnessing a rapidly accelerating decline in the things we manage.
Every policy action sets off a ripple effect across complex social, economic, and environmental connections – our escalating global challenges are the symptoms of our management rather than a lack of scientific knowledge or innovation.
People, economies, and nature are not produced or manufactured; they are managed.
Nothing we produce is self-organising. The things we make cease to function if we stop producing or using them, and if production is inhumane or harmful to people or the environment, we can change the method of production.
Therefore, the cause of the problem does not lie in the things we produce. The cause lies in the way we manage our societies, economies, and nature.
Our societies, economies, and natural world function in inseparably complex, unpredictable, and self-organising wholes, patterns, and relationships. Yet our current management separates these connections, resulting in the increasingly damaging unintended consequences that are driving environmental degradation, economic instability, and social breakdown.
Reductionist Management at Scale
It is an inherited inability to manage this complexity that is causing our escalating global problems, and this is what world leaders need to understand and address. Our management of people, economies, and nature on a huge scale through institutional policies is the biggest driver of our problems.
Society believes there are many different ways of managing or developing policies, but all governments, from democracies to dictatorships, develop policies exactly the same way.
At scale, our societies, economies, and environment are divided into separate ministries and departments and managed in silos through impersonal government and organisational policies. These policies are based on expert advice from narrowly trained professionals in each field, along with input from interested parties, pressure groups, and political interests.
The Elephant in the Room
Imagine trying to manage a whole elephant by dividing it into parts. It is made up of thousands of inseparable parts, yet we separate them and create a ministry of bones, tusks, eyes, ears, etc, with experts advising policymakers on each part in isolation, with no one who has understood or studied the elephant as a whole. In doing so, nobody considers the impact these policies will have on the health of the elephant itself.
Developing policies in this way reduces the complexity of humans, economies, and nature into isolated parts, with the short-term objectives of each ministry being met without considering the inevitable and damaging long-term consequences that ripple across the complex whole.
Reductionist policymaking ultimately undermines the health and well-being of all citizens, destabilises economies, and degrades the environment upon which all lives and livelihoods depend.
Nowhere are the consequences of our reductionist management more visible than in agriculture.
INSTITUTIONAL FRAGMENTATION AND POLICY SILOS
Modern governance structures divide knowledge into specialised disciplines and administrative departments. While this promotes technical expertise, it fragments management and ignores long-term consequences across the whole.
As John Ralston Saul observed in Voltaire's Bastards:
‘The division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of expertise has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted.’
When knowledge is compartmentalised:
- Coordinated action weakens.
- Policymaking becomes fragmented.
- Long-term consequences are ignored.
- Public trust diminishes.
The application of new management and ecological principles are essential for managing effectively within our complex world.
A critical yet often overlooked reality is that institutions—once formed—take on a life of their own. As legal entities, they are inherently incapable of morality, common sense, or accountability, and their primary interests become self-preservation, financing, and expansion. As a result, policy development is shaped by impersonal institutional priorities rather than by the long-term interests of a nation’s citizens.
This helps us understand why all agricultural policies remain unsound and are the greatest contributors to our escalating environmental, social and economic decline.
For Zimbabwe, recognising this dynamic is essential. As a nation with deep agricultural heritage, it has a rare opportunity to take the lead in breaking through institutional blockages to develop the first ever agricultural policy rooted not in institutional inertia, but in the enduring well-being of its people, its economy, and its environment.
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT: A FRAMEWORK FOR REGENERATION
The Holistic Management Framework provides us with a set of management and ecological principles designed to help us successfully manage complexity and restore biodiversity. Rather than prescribing actions or practices, it helps us to proactively adapt any action, practice, or policy to the complex circumstances it will be carried out in and impacting.
Within this framework, ecological literacy becomes essential, and we need to understand that environments respond differently to the same influences at either end of the brittleness scale and that livestock can be used as a vital biological tool to regenerate degraded landscapes across the world’s brittle (arid) environments.
Through the application of the Holistic Planned Grazing Process, the correct timing and impact of herds of livestock restore soil health, increase biodiversity, and repair the four ecosystem processes. By mimicking the natural behaviour of wild herds, this biological tool ensures the regeneration of our land and rivers, restoring social and economic stability for both people and wildlife.
This framework ensures that managers:
- Use a broader, Holistic Context (more information) to proactively guide and determine our complex actions.
- Base policies and actions on ecological processes and biological realities.
- Anticipate unintended consequences.
- Proactively adapt actions and policies to complex, unpredictable circumstances.
- Apply the right tools in the right circumstances to ensure the practical regeneration of land and waters.
- Promote long-term resilience and consistent regeneration.
- Bring coordinated action, accountability, humanity, common sense and a common environmental ethic to organisational policy development.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR ZIMBABWE
Zimbabwe is uniquely positioned to lead the development of the first regenerative agricultural policy and have the first policy in history to simultaneously and consistently:
- Restore biodiversity.
- Enhance food security.
- Strengthen livelihoods.
- Accelerate economic growth.
- Reverse desertification and climate change.
This risk-free shift in policy development would demonstrate true statesmanship and establish Zimbabwe as the global pioneer in regenerative agriculture.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- Adopt the Holistic Management Framework: provide a framework for successfully managing complexity, tying the nation's social and economic stability to environmental health, ensuring that policies and actions are simultaneously socially, economically, and environmentally sound in both the short and long term.
- Facilitation and Guidance: Governments should engage experts in applying the Holistic Management Framework to guide, facilitate, and teach the development and evaluation of the first agricultural policy to be developed through this process.
- Ground Agricultural Policy in Biological Sciences: prioritise soil health, biodiversity, and the healthy function of the four ecosystem processes which are the foundation of all life and all human endeavour.
- Promote Regenerative Agricultural Practices: support management on the ground that restores ecosystem processes and improves productivity.
- Align Policy, Practice, and Education with the Biological Sciences: ensure that farmers and land managers are supported and encouraged to base their practices on soil health and ecological principles. Redirect incentives, institutional support, and university curricula away from chemistry, oil, and technology-driven models toward biologically grounded agriculture, enabling practitioners to implement regenerative practices with confidence and support.
- Reform Institutional Coordination: encourage cross-ministerial collaboration towards a common environmental ethic.
- Strengthen Education and Extension Services: incorporate ecological literacy and complexity management into curricula.
- Support Research and Demonstration Projects: establish pilot programmes showcasing regenerative agriculture.
- Develop Integrated National Policies
CONCLUSION
No nation on earth can have physical or economic stability unless agriculture is regenerative - and no agricultural policy will be consistently regenerative until we break through institutional barriers and change how policies are developed.
Zimbabwe's agricultural future will not be determined by investment or innovation alone, but by effectively managing the complexity of our rising population and deteriorating land.
True regeneration requires policies rooted in the biological sciences and guided by a National Holistic Context, tying the nation's social and economic stability to environmental health, ensuring that agricultural policy secures the health and well-being of all citizens and their life-supporting environment.
This would provide the foundation for a new generation of global social, economic, and environmental regeneration, with agricultural policies no longer based on chemistry and the corporate marketing of oil and technology, but on soil health and the biological sciences.
Born in Zimbabwe, this knowledge belongs to our nation and has the potential to place us at the forefront of global regenerative change—if we choose to lead.
The future of agriculture is regenerative—and it begins with a change in management.
Sarah Savory
