Irrigated farming could end hunger woes

New analysis suggests that Malawi's food security crisis, which threatens more than three million people, may well be a case of famine in a land of potential plenty. Malawi's agricultural economy, weighed down by serious food shortages, deepening malnutrition, abject poverty, and unreliable weather, has to stop looking to the sky for rain in order to plant crops, a government review of policy and strategy has said. The traditionally rain fed and seasonal agriculture needs to produce crops all year round, to avoid a repeat of the hunger experienced this year, experts believe. Some 3.2 million people in Malawi are estimated to require food aid from now until March 2003 as a result of drought, that has exacerbated existing food insecurity problems. Malawi suffers from long dry spells that occasionally disrupt the rainfall season. Even minor water deficits have had a dramatic impact on crop yields, especially when these shortages take place during the flowering stage of the main staple, maize. Malawian farmers are said to be mostly unproductive during the dry season because of the seasonality of crop production. The government review said this labour could be put to better use on irrigated farming. The country has vast resources of fresh water. Lake Malawi is located in the great rift basin and is the tenth largest freshwater lake in the world. Yet Malawians have not utilised this water source for cropping purposes. UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) officer in Malawi, Des Fortes, told IRIN on Wednesday: "Malawians have not started using other water resources available to them like the wetlands, they call them 'dambos' here. "One of the potential areas for irrigation is a tributary of lake Malawi, the Shire River which flows south and joins the Zambezi. This river is totally unexploited during winter. This could easily be the breadbasket of Malawi. There's a very big potential in the Shire River Valley for using water during winter to grow food crops - maize, vegetables like beans and other legume crops." Fortes said the government of Malawi was now considering supplying manually operated treadle pumps to small farmers to assist with winter cropping. He said: "It would take about 30,000 treadle pumps, [with one water pump] you can easily grow a quarter to half an acre of crops during the winter season. "Then you can have crops also during the [traditional] summer season. The Shire Valley as well as other places where you have some wetlands, where you have rivers and lakes, Lake Malawi for example, is an area where hardly any water is being used for irrigation. Yet the lake is a substantial water resource to be used for crop lands." It had initially been proposed by the FAO and World Food Programme that 2,500 treadle pumps be given to vulnerable families in the wetlands to maximise their winter production this year, "as an emergency measure to reduce the food gap". Malawi has traditionally been a rain fed agricultural economy since it was established as a British protectorate, Nyasaland, in 1891 and into independence in 1964. While several studies done since 1970 put Malawi's irrigation potential at 200,000 hectares, only 26,100 hectares have been exploited, according to the Malawi Agricultural Sector Investment Plan (MASIP) report. MASIP is a partnership agreement signed in May 2002, between the government of Malawi and nine of its development partners. The agreement outlines the key steps needed to spur the growth of Malawi's agricultural sector, aimed at reducing poverty by addressing the issues affecting people's agricultural livelihoods. A study of the country's potential for irrigation carried out in 1980 identified 57 potential irrigation projects in the country. Of these, seven were found in the northern region, 12 in the central region and 38 in the south. Out of the 38 potential sites for irrigation in the southern region, 25 are in the Lower Shire Valley. "This implies that the Lower Shire Valley has the greatest potential for irrigation development in the country," the report said. Most of this land lies in the plains along the shores of Lake Malawi in Karonga and Nkhotakota, Salima, the Lake Chilwa Plain, the Lower Shire Valley and the flood plain of Limphasa River in Nkhata Bay in the northern part of the country. "These areas have fertile soils and adequate water resources for the development of irrigated agriculture," the report added. A US $1.9 million Targeted Input Programme (TIP), for winter wet season cropping launched in April this year, was a response to the currrent food crisis. George Chande, TIP coordinator, told IRIN that 300,000 farmers have already been identified in all the country's eight Agricultural Development Divisions (ADDs) of Karonga and Mzuzu in the north, Kasungu, Salima and Lilongwe in the centre and Machinga, Blantyre and the Shire Valley in the south. Each farmer will receive five kilograms of fertiliser and two kilograms of maize seed, Chande said. He added that each farmer must have composite manure and suitable land of 0.1 hectares. A total of 75,000 mt of maize is expected to be harvested by October this year, "if all farmers grow 30,000 hectares of land," he said. A US $14.8 million Japanese funded Bwanje Valley Irrigation Development (BVID) project along Lake Malawi in the Salima district, has been developed following a study in 1991/92. Chande said the BVID project, which diverted water from streams, benefited 2,240 farming families. Of these, 760 are female-headed households. The major crops under this scheme are rice, dry season sweet potatoes, peas and maize. There is also a Small Holder Flat Plains Development Programme (SFPDP) which started in November/December 1998 in Nkhotakota district and is expected to run until 2005. The SFPDP rehabilitates and develops irrigation schemes. The major objective of this project is to improve food security and the economic status of the people in the flat plain areas. Chande said the project had several components, including capacity and institutional support to empower consumers and management. While the irrigation component develops new areas and rehabilitates old systems, another component aims to improve the marketing of profitable crops to farmers such as rice and tomatoes. Yet another component is the community infrastructure support service that constructs boreholes, pit latrines and feeder roads. There is also an expanded rural financial service that provides soft loans to communities. Sugarcane production under irrigation began in 1965. Large-scale estate commercial production of sugarcane under irrigation is now well established in Chikwawa and Nkhotakota Districts, through the multi-national corporation Illovo Sugar. The report said Malawi must now intensify irrigated agriculture in the drought-prone country, as recent studies suggest that dry spells are set to continue.