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Adopt commercial farming—BAM

 

The Bankers Association of Malawi (BAM) has advised government to make serious efforts in ensuring that the country migrates from subsistence farming to commercial, irrigation farming if the rising inflation is to be tamed.

Malawi’s inflation remains comparatively the highest in the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) region at 22 percent in July.

Contrasting fortunes: Kakunde under-five clinic in Chitipa (L) helps surrounding villages access children’s health services while Mwaiwathu Private Hospital in Blantyre offers high quality healthcare for the privileged
Contrasting fortunes: Kakunde under-five clinic in Chitipa (L) helps surrounding villages access children’s health services while Mwaiwathu Private Hospital in Blantyre offers high quality healthcare for the privileged

In an interview with Business News, BAM president Misheck Esau said subsistence farming has failed Malawi considering the lack of progress despite massive investment in the initiative.

“We have been subsidising the price of maize, as you know most of the inflation comes from maize; the Consumer Price Index basket is dominated by food at about 60 percent. What that means is that inflation has been tackled from the supply side. The Reserve Bank of Malawi has been dealing with the demand side of the inflation equation.

“If we tackle supply, that is if we start producing crops that are needed to tame inflation, then we could do better,” he said.

Esau said that there is need for collaborative effort from experts from the ministries of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development, and Lands, Housing and Urban Development if this initiative is to be successful.

Mid this year, Minister of Finance, Economic Planning and Development Goodall Gondwe said that the cost of the Farm Inputs Subsidy Programme (Fisp) would be limited to K40 billion ($66,429,000), a considerable saving over K59.7 billion ($99,145,200) spent during the 2014/15 financial year.

But in October, government committed K15 billion ($24,910,900) more for the seed component of the programme, bringing the total of Fisp to K55 billion ($91,339,800).

In an interview with The Guardian last month in Lilongwe, President Peter Mutharika said as one way of eradicating hunger in Malawi, his administration intends to commercialise agriculture by, among other things, distributing tractors to farmers through cooperatives with assistance from the government of India.

In 2012, however, a similar arrangement failed to take off in earnest when government disposed of about 177 tractors, 144 maize shellers, and other accessories meant to mechanise agriculture which was funded to the tune of a $50 million loan from India. n

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2 Comments

  1. There is no political will to change the status quo. Logic dictates that subsistence farming never works and is a poverty trap for many in our country. How do you expect a quarter acre piece of land to sustain a family of five for the whole year? Economists know this but it requires political will to change course. Let us scrap subsistence farming now!!! The government needs to enact land laws which align with large scale production of agricultural products. All the money these baboons are wasting could be used to start the process of land reform which will lead to eventual abolition of subsistence farming.

    We all know that if we abandon subsistence farming, our opportunistic politicians will have nothing to gain from the rural mass who have become dependent on subsidies and hence votes at general elections. Selfishness and greed is destroying our country and nobody has the balls to do something radical about our farming system which we know is holding back progress.

    Malawi is paralysed by inaction and lack of forward thinking and unless we change our mindset on a number of things, we will continue to experience poverty and deprivation. It will only get worse!

  2. From the implementation of FISP in 2005, Malawi had 8 consecutive years of surplus maize harvests (some years in excess of a million metric tonnes), and yet we saw no resulting decline in the nation’s malnutrition rates (47% of children under the age of 5 are nutritionally ‘stunted’). Perhaps the time has come to call for diversification in agriculture, rather than the same old tired calls for scaling-up monocropped maize production through irrigation, tractors, and millions of dollars in subsidies. Diversification also diversifies economic opportunities, and can be accomplished through the integration of perennial and seasonal crops that can provide yields throughout the entirety of Malawi’s 12-month tropical growing conditions (without the need for irrigation). Low-input, appropriate, and sustainable solutions exist, but we need to start looking beyond maize as the only food, the only cash crop, and the only thing worth investing in.

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