BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD: MEET SMALLHOLDERS TAKING A NEW APPROACH FOR INTEGRATING INTO COMMERCIAL VALUE CHAINS AND SUSTAINABLE AGRI-FOOD SYSTEMS
By George Z Goliati
Poor and hungry while sitting on a money and food basket
We are smallscale farmers from northern parts of Traditional Authorities (TAs) Makata of Blantyre district and Chitera of Chiradzulu district, and south of TA Mulumbe of Zomba district.
Our villages are endowed with streams that include Midule, which originates from Chiradzulu, and Mlombozi, which originates from Zomba. The villages have been supported with three irrigation schemes covering about 60 to 70 hectares. The streams, the schemes and other wells provide an opportunity for irrigation farming.
Contrary many of us are plagued with food insecurity every year and recycling poverty. Even though the average landholding size is below 0.5 hectares per household while some have more than 1 hectare, we are unable to use our land resources and the irrigation opportunities to intensify our farming that more than 50 to 70 hectares of irrigable land remain unused.
We grow maize, beans, tomatoes and onions under irrigated farming. We also grow maize, pigeon peas, groundnuts, soy beans and millet under rain-fed farming and sell our marginal produce to vendors and local markets only. With our marginal yields and inability to access other markets, we benefit less from our farming activities, especially from the streams and the irrigation infrastructures compared with what we could.
Committing suicide in search for survival
Just like many farmers elsewhere in Malawi, even if supported with inputs like hybrid seeds and fertiliser, we often sell them to meet our daily cash needs. Worse still, we are increasingly selling our land just to get some cash to sort out our pressing needs as we can't earn enough to move ourselves out of poverty from farming.
Eventually, we have been compelled to over-exploit our forest resources on our 50 km range of hills and the valleys, which has left our landscapes almost bare. We can't even venture into charcoal production as before that farming labour is our only source of day-to-day income and survival. Natural resources degradation is even threatening our marginalized irrigation farming.
Time to be the change we want to see in our communities
As concerned poor farmers, we combined forces with unemployed educated youths to form a new model of a rural-based cooperative, a local farmer organisation, under the Chipande Extension Planning Area (EPA), geared towards enabling ourselves, as marginal farmers, to adequately and sustainably benefit from smallscale farming while conserving our nature.
We are determined to serve fellow most vulnerable households, those that sell their donated or subsidised inputs, their land and their little yields soon after harvesting to meet pressing needs, those that cannot afford collateral or savings to benefit from available loan facilities. These include women, elderly, opharns, the disabled etc, who will dominate our membership.
We are responding to the opportunity and need for agricultural intensification
According to the Department of Irrigation (2015), the estimated irrigation potential area is 450,000 ha,16.7% of the arable cultivable area of 2.7 million ha. Only 63,000 ha is developed for irrigation, representing 14%, of which about 14,697 ha (3%) is under smallholder while the rest is under private estates. According to FAO (2015), due to increased demand for food, agricultural production globally will need to increase by 60% by 2050 of which only 20% will come from forest clearing for agricultural expansion while 80% will have to come from intensified farming.
As New Partnership for Development (NEPAD) (2013) note, cereal yields in Africa are less than half of the yields obtained in Asia. Agricultural intensification has therefore not occurred in Africa. According to World Bank (2009), for instance, cereal yields per hectare moved from a little over 1 ton per hectare in 1960 to 4.5 tons per hectare in 2005 in South Asian countries, compared to about 0.9 tons per hectare in 1960 to a little over 1 ton per hectare in 2005 in Sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1961 and 2009, cereal yields in Sub-Saharan Africa grew by 0.95% compared to 2.4% in East Asia, 1.95% in Latin America and Caribbean and 1.95% in South Asia (Chirwa and Dorward, 2013). But as African Development Bank (AfDB) (2016) notes, Africa has huge potential to attain food security as well as to produce agricultural surpluses for engaging in international trade if it can exploit its land and human capital in improving agricultural productivity.
We are Midule Farmers Organisation, a commercial, sustainability and digital-oriented smallscale farmers cooperative composed of poor rural farmers and unemployed educated youths.
Our vision is increased profits, adequate nutritious food and sustainable social-economic development and environment through smallscale farming. Our mission is to produce and aggregate for quality-oriented markets using quality-oriented, diversified and ecological anchor farming approach with the aid of digital technologies and educated youth skills.
Our strategic objectives include (i) strategic farming to correspond with existing quality-oriented and profitable markets and agribusiness support, (ii) diverse and low-cost ecological anchor farming (ecological technologies and mechanisation), (iii) digital-based extension and monitoring to reduce production and marketing risks and (iv) localised quality control and aggregation for quality-oriented markets.
