Project aims to improve agricultural production

An ambitious project hopes to transform drought-hit Malawi into a possible food exporter in the next three years. The Agricultural Input Markets Development (AIMS) project aims to address constraints to sustainable agricultural development and improve smallholder farmers access to seed variants, fertiliser and crop protection products in Malawi. Herschel Weeks, of the International Fertiliser Development Centre (IFDC) said: "It's the most exciting project that I've ever been involved in. It'll have more positive impact maybe more than any other project currently going on in Malawi." IFDC said the project was working to establish a "vibrant private sector-led agricultural-inputs supply and marketing system". This would strengthen the institutional capacity of the government with regard to policy reforms, regulatory system design and implementation, and information collection, analysis and dissemination. "It will develop and implement a program to 'marketise' donor-funded input distribution programmes ... the project will design and operate a market information system (MIS) on agricultural input market conditions. The project will provide direct technical assistance to entrepreneurs and bankers through training programmes, workshops and study tours; design and assist in implementation of a regulatory system; and conduct policy analysis to deepen the policy reforms," an IFDC statement said. Capacity building training would seek to enhance the entrepreneurship skills of agricultural-inputs dealers and "develop a cadre of dealers who could become technology transfer agents". The project aims also to facilitate improved access to finance for agricultural-inputs suppliers and to improve dealer and farmer knowledge of appropriate input use practices. Weeks said the project would benefit all levels of people, from smallholder farmers to exporters, once it was up and running. With funding from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) the Malawi government and the private sector, Weeks believes the project has "all the major players ... behind us and supporting us 100 percent". To improve food production, Weeks said, there was a need to focus on three major areas: improved seeds, adequate supply of fertiliser and irrigation farming. "We're hoping this is a very successful project that will assist Malawi in getting back to being 100 percent food self-sufficient plus having food to export to the region," he added. He said Malawi was currently struggling to import about 200,000 mt of fertiliser per year when the actual need was for 540,000 mt. "If the required [amount] of fertiliser found its way into Malawi we could easily see yields triple. The 600,000 mt food shortage right now would be wiped out ... if we had access to improved seed varieties and access to fertilisers," he added. Veronica Chipeta, an IFDC economist involved in the AIMS project, said the project hoped to do this by reducing the high cost of fertiliser in Malawi. Transportation costs pushed the price of fertiliser to US $325 mt, whereas the world market price was US $90 for the same quantity. Fertiliser cost more in Malawi than in most other countries in the region. "Where are all these costs coming from? That's what we're trying to track down to see where these [cost] components come from," she told IRIN. Weeks said addressing the fertiliser deficit would allow the project to start working on acquiring "improved seeds to go with that fertiliser, the real goal is not so much that we increase fertiliser usage, the real goal is to improve and increase food production". Previously, farmers were able to rotate farming fields when the crop yields were low to allow the soil to replenish nutrients, but this practice had changed due to population pressure in recent years. The Malawi government and aid agencies recently reported that Malawi faces a food shortage of 600,000 mt that threatens 3.3 million people. "In Malawi right now only about 25 percent to 30 percent of the farming land has fertiliser applied to it at all," Weeks noted. At the launch of the AIMS project in Lilongwe, Agriculture and Irrigation Minister Aleke Banda said the country's input use indicators were very poor with 160,000 mt of soil nutrients being lost every year and only 90,000 mt being replenished. Banda said only a few farmers in the country could afford fertiliser and only 20 percent of them accessed improved seed varieties. He said the project had been developed in response to a study by the government and IFDC which recommended the establishment of a special programme to deal with problems in accessing farm inputs. "We're hoping that we'll be able to make very rapid progress. Within the next year we'll have established the beginning of an association and I hope that we'll have ordered a major supply of inputs directly within a year's time," Banda said.