Arable Farming:A Comparative Analysis Of China And Botswana

Agriculture is said to be as old as man. It dates back to man’s quest for survival. Arable farming, the art of growing crops is one of the earliest forms of agriculture. Over the years, arable farming or arable agriculture has undergone through different stages of transformation as man aims to improve on the quality and quantity of his production. The desire to improve on the quantity of arable faring is re-enforced by the growing population of the world. How to feed the world has become a major question in the lips of world leaders with the world population expected to hit9billion by2050, an increase of40per cent at the current level.Botswana and China are two countries with modern day challenges of meeting the food needs of their population. With a population of more than1.3billion people, the highest in the world, China is faced with the headache of providing food for each member of the population. It has risen from the ashes of acute hunger in the middle of the20th century to meet the food needs of its population, and even has enough to spare as aide to some other countries in need. The story is not too different with Botswana. Although it is not involved in giving food aides to other countries, the country has not been begging for food either. One striking thing is that both countries have defied some natural man-made forces to rely largely on arable farming to feed their populations. This paper seeks to do a comparative analysis of arable agriculture in both countries. It aims to discover the different best practices in both countries and establish whether there are areas they can learn from each other.