Farming – Agribusiness & Value Chains · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026
When a mine closes, a town loses more than a payroll. It loses the single industry that gave it a reason to exist, the wages that fed every shop and landlord around it, and the identity built up over decades of one kind of work. The question that follows is whether anything can grow in the space the mine leaves. In Selebi Phikwe, part of the answer is being planted in citrus.
Following the BCL copper-mine closure, government agriculture and tourism programmes in the town now include a citrus project employing over 300 workers and seeking expansion. It is a deliberate attempt to replace mineral extraction with something that renews each season rather than running down toward exhaustion.
The Hole: A Town Built on Copper
Selebi Phikwe was a BCL town in the fullest sense. The copper and nickel mine anchored its economy, and its closure removed the base on which the local labour market stood, leaving skilled workers without an industry to apply their skills to. Botswana has seen this pattern in its mineral towns: a single resource that funds a community until the resource is exhausted, the price collapses, or the operation becomes uneconomic, at which point the town discovers how narrow its foundation always was.
The government response, through agriculture and tourism programmes, treats Selebi Phikwe as a diversification problem rather than a closed chapter. The aim is to give the town an economic identity that does not depend on what lies underground, and the SPEDU region around it has been the focus of that effort. The challenge is that mining wages and mining skills do not transfer cleanly into farming and hospitality, so diversification is also a question of retraining and patience, not only of new projects.
A mine that closes leaves a town in search of a second purpose.
The Pivot: From Extraction to Cultivation
The citrus project employs more than 300 workers, a meaningful figure in a town that lost its main employer and the indirect jobs that depended on it. Unlike copper, citrus is a renewable crop: it produces year after year, it builds skills in agriculture rather than mining, and it can feed both domestic markets and, with the right grading, packing and cold-chain logistics, export ones. That the project is now seeking expansion suggests it has cleared the first test of viability, which is to survive long enough to want to grow.
The contrast with the mine is the point of the whole exercise. Extraction depletes; cultivation renews. A town that pivots from one to the other is trading a finite asset for a recurring one, and trading a boom-and-bust dependence on commodity prices for the steadier, if smaller, rhythm of harvests. For Botswana, whose national economy faces a version of the same question as diamonds eventually decline, Selebi Phikwe is a working model of the transition the whole country may one day need.
Copper runs out, but a citrus grove comes back every season.
The Test: Can Expansion Hold
Employing 300 workers is a start, not a replacement for a mine's full economic weight, which ran into the thousands of direct and dependent jobs. The project's request to expand is where the real question sits: whether citrus in Selebi Phikwe can scale into a complete value chain with packing, grading, processing and reliable market access, or whether it remains a useful but modest employment programme. Expansion is what would turn a pilot into a pillar, and that depends on water, on capital, on agronomic suitability, and on someone to buy the fruit at a price that sustains the operation.
Botswana's wider diversification agenda is full of such tests, many of which stall at exactly this point, where a promising start meets the harder economics of scale. Selebi Phikwe is a concrete case of it, with real workers and a real crop already in the ground, which makes its outcome worth watching as a signal of whether the country's post-mineral ambitions can move from announcement to durable enterprise.
Diversification proves itself at the point of scaling, not starting.
The citrus project will not on its own undo the loss of BCL, and it would be dishonest to suggest a grove can stand in for a mine. But it offers Selebi Phikwe something a mine never could: an economy that grows back. Whether the expansion is funded and the value chain built will signal how seriously Botswana intends to follow through on the pivot it has begun, and how much of its diversification rhetoric it is prepared to turn into rows of trees.
Sources: allAfrica
