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The tobacco fraternity has welcomed government’s effort to take into consideration the recommendations made by a task force on implementation of tobacco reforms.
One of the recommendations was that there should be a smallholder farmer representation on the board of Tobacco Control Commission (TCC) and Agriculture Research Extension Trust (Aret).
Another recommendation was that there should be a representation of National Smallholder Farmers (Nasfam) on TCC board.
The stakeholders described the choice of Ben Dzowela as the chairman of the TCC board as encouraging since Dzowela is an agriculturalist with vast experience in the field after once being president of the Tobacco Association of Malawi, (Tama).
Other members of the TCC board include Andrew Mzumacharo who was once president of Tama and Demetri Giannakis currently running Farmers World.
Tama Executive Secretary Felix Mkumba said the appointment of people with vast experience in tobacco farming will give confidence to the smallholder farmers in policy making.
“They didn’t choose these people from a vacuum but they did their job thoroughly. I am sure there will be professionalism in their duties since most of them have knowledge in the supply chain,” said Mkumba
However Mkumba said the Aret board, which is under a Trust Deed under the control of Tama and government, will wait for a meeting in order for the recommendations to be taken on board.
Aret’s Director and Chief Executive Eric Chilembwe indicated that the recommendation on Aret to include Nasfam on its board meant that Admarc should be removed and be replaced with Nasfam since it (Admarc) no longer grows Tobacco.
“Our board has no problem to include Nasfam, it has agreed but we agreed that since Admarc is still under restructuring, we should wait until the process is over so that it can resume its old roles of buying tobacco from the small-scale farmers,” said Chilembwe.
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