This article focuses on the efforts of the Botswana government to support commercial grain farming as a strategy to achieve long-term food security, largely through increased agricultural productivity. It examines the possibilities for achieving greater food security between 1983 and 2000 through a state-sponsored model of large- scale capitalist production of grain crops at Pandamatenga village, a borderland hamlet in Chobe District in north- western Botswana. The article traces the development of the first attempt at commercial farming by selected indigenous farmers and how the project later collapsed, necessitating recruitment of experienced white expatriate farmers. It argues that, although commercial farming provided possibilities for improved productivity and a modicum of food security as well as expanded employment and the transfer of skills, it was limited by the fact that it was dominated by expatriate growers, excluding indigenous farmers in the area, and the fact that food insecurity is itself the result of inequality and constrained purchasing household levels.

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