The Steve Pocock Podcast

From the series Doing Business in Timor-Leste . Vinay Mathur is a chartered accountant who started out as an external auditor, then moved into prominent roles with PepsiCo and Heineken. He moved to Timor-Leste to set up Heineken's operations, built a greenfield brewery from the ground up, and has since gone on to co-found Halodili, Timor-Leste's largest e-commerce platform, and Think Forwa...

In Episode 6, the final episode of this series, I bring everything together and keep it practical by focusing on the role we all play in realising the potential of agriculture in Zimbabwe. I talk through what government needs to prioritise, what investors and the private sector need in order to back the sector, what large commercial operators can do to drive growth and build value chains, and what...

In Episode 5, I shift from context to solutions and focus on practical steps to lift agricultural productivity in Zimbabwe. I break it into two big priorities. First, how to back the commercial farming sector as an economic engine that drives exports, jobs, innovation, and investment across the value chain. Second, how to lift millions of smallholders out of low yield subsistence farming through a...

In Episode 4, I zoom out and share some of the most useful lessons I picked up during my Nuffield travels, and translate them into what could actually work in Zimbabwe. I focus on two big, practical dilemmas. 1. Labour: when cheap labour is an advantage, when it becomes a trap, and how Zimbabwe can shift people into better jobs across processing and value chains as productivity rises. 2. Climate c...

In Episode 3, I get out of the policy world and onto the farms themselves. To understand where Zimbabwean agriculture is today, you need to see it through the eyes of the people working the land. I walk through three different realities: a subsistence farmer in a drought-prone communal area, a young small scale commercial farmer trying to build a business on an A2 farm, and a large scale commercia...

In Episode 2, we get into the early 2000s land redistribution, and the current state of Zimbabwean agriculture. I walk through what triggered the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, how it unfolded, and the big on-the-ground impacts it had on farming: the loss of skills and systems, the collapse of investment when land stopped being bankable collateral, and how those changes fed into a broader natio...

In Episode 1, I set the foundation for this six-part series on the future of farming in Zimbabwe. I share my own story - growing up on a farm near Gweru, losing it during the Fast Track Land Reform period, and later returning to Zimbabwe to work on rural development. Then we zoom out and go back to the beginning: how Zimbabwe’s colonial land policies created “two farms” - a well-resourced commerci...