Zambia's main agricultural exports are cotton, sugar, and cut flowers. Agricultural exports increased significantly
between 1993 and 1998 from US$27.2 million to US$89.7 million. However, Zambia's agricultural sector has historically lacked significant infrastructure and productive investment. This means that the sector is highly underdeveloped whilst offering considerable potential if large investment was supplied. For example, neighboring Zimbabwe, which is of a comparable size and climate to Zambia, exported US$1,157 million of agricultural goods in 1998. The key problem with Zambia's failure to fully exploit its agricultural production to a similar extent as Zimbabwe is that agricultural imports have significantly outweighed agricultural exports throughout the 1990s. This represented another imbalance on the national balance of payments and a serious drain of foreign currency reserves that have to be used to pay for imports.