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President Bakili Muluzi, reacting to growers’ complaints about low tobacco prices, has pleaded with buyers to offer better prices to sustain growing of the country’s top foreign exchange earner.
Speaking when he officially opened this year’s tobacco market season at Limbe Auction Floors yesterday, Muluzi said buyers should treat tobacco growing as a business from which farmers expect a profit.
“I believe that while the grower cannot survive without the buyer, the buyer cannot survive without the grower. The two have some social responsibility towards each other.
“On behalf of the farmers, I appeal to buyers to pay appropriate prices to ensure that tobacco growers have good income,” said Muluzi.
He also advised farmers to produce good quality leaf and grade it well in order to get high prices from the crop.
Tobacco accounts for over 60 percent of Malawi’s total exports and contributes 10 percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the total value of goods and services produced in a year.
The cash crop is cultivated by nearly 18.9 percent of the small holder households, totalling to 375,000 farmers throughout the country.
Yesterday, good quality tobacco fetched up to US$2 a kilogramme while bottom leaf tobacco could go for US$1.20, prices that Tobacco Association of Malawi (Tama) chair Albert Kamulaga described as alright since most of the leaf on the floors is still of low quality.
This year, government pushed for early opening of the floors as opposed to the usual April in a bid to get foreign exchange to prop up the economy in the light of frozen donor aid.
Speaking at the same event, Auction Holdings Limited (AHL) chair Evance Chipala said, a total of nine million kilogrammes of tobacco have been sold over the past one month, realising more than US$10 million.
Chipala said the country has this year grown two million kilogrammes of tobacco more than last year which recorded a total of 134.1 million kilogrammes.
Reappointed second vice President and Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Food Security Chakufwa Chihana said Malawi cannot continue to depend on tobacco for survival and should instead identify an alternative.
Chihana, who was carrying out his first public function after being sworn in on Monday this week, announced that his ministry will in “the next few weeks” announce the substitute cash crop.
He also wondered why Malawi, a market leader and the largest exporter of burley tobacco in the world, cannot manufacture cigarettes and stop importing them from other countries.
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