Fostina Kachimera in her maize garden that she planted under irrigation. Since she has started to use irrigation she no longer lives in fear of dry spells. Credit: Esmie Komwa Eneya/IPS

By Esmie Komwa Eneya
BLANTYRE, MALAWI, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

In the past, the people of Sande Village in Chikwawa district, Malawi, would go to bed with empty stomachs even when the rest of the country harvested bumper yields.

This is because the area in southern Malawi is prone to both floods and drought – making rain-fed agriculture difficult.

One woman farmer, Fostina Kachimera, said that after practising rain-fed agriculture over several years without results, she stopped farming and was just sitting idle because agriculture was her only option for employment.

“When we try to do rain-fed agriculture is either the crops will be swept away by floods or burnt by drought before they even start to produce fruits,” she said.

Chikwawa and Nsanje districts are situated in the Shire River valley.

According to Shire Valley Agriculture Development Division (Shivadd) programme manager Francis Mlewah, the valley has 313 215 hectares of land, but almost half experiences prolonged dry spells.

“In addition to that, its annual rainfall falls between 400 to 1000 mm, and this is below the average annual rainfall needed by most of the crops grown in the country,”  Mlewah says, explaining that optimal rainfall was above 1 200mm.

Then there is flooding.

“One-third of the land is situated along the country’s biggest river, and indeed farmers who cultivate their crops in these areas face floods almost every year,” he explained.

Now, this has become a song of the past because Kachimera and her fellow 259 farmers can now harvest three crops a year through irrigation. This has enabled them to produce enough food for the year and a surplus to sell.

All the farmers had also managed to build substantial houses which withstand floods – unlike in the past when floods often damaged their homes.

The Evangelical Association of Malawi came to their rescue in 2007 and introduced irrigation farming.

“We started as a club, but by 2010 we transformed into a scheme known as Sande.

“When we were starting, we were using water canes to irrigate our crops, but right now we are using water pumps which we purchased through the profits from irrigation farming, and almost every one of us has managed to buy one,” said the scheme’s chairperson Samuel Wise.

Apart from growing maize, the country’s staple food, Wise explained that the system produces different crops such as legumes, tubers, and vegetables.

According to him, the idea is to have diverse foods available to combat malnutrition and fetch reasonable prices on the market.

Once the irrigation started, the families started to live healthy lives.

They no longer lack necessities such as clothes, soap and can pay school fees for their children.

“In the past, transportation was so difficult for us since we could not afford even the cheapest bicycle, but now we have motorbikes that we bought with the farm proceeds,” he said.

Malawi’s Deputy Agriculture Minister Agnes Nkusankhoma recently visited the scheme and praised it.

“Finding the big area like this green is rare especially considering that this is the dry season, and these farmers made this place look like we are in the rainy season.”

Nkusankhoma encouraged them to register in the livestock subsidy program to add to what they are already doing because livestock production does well in these districts.

While the farmers relish their success, they lament the rising fuel prices. The water pumps are reliant on fuel – shrinking their profits.

The community will benefit from the Shire Valley Transformation Programme – a government-led project financed by World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Global Environment Facility.

According to the project’s coordinator, Stanly Chakhumbira, the project put 43 370 hectares under irrigation using gravity to divert water from the river to the canals. Once this is completed, farmers will no longer need to rely on fuel.

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Zimbabwe’s smallholder farmers are reliant on rain, which impacts the country’s food security efforts. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
Bulawayo, ZIMBABWE , Feb 1 2022 (IPS)

On January 10, the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) arrested three men found with fertilizer worth about 130,000 US dollars.

The “loot” was identified as part of inputs provided by the government to smallholder farmers in the country’s efforts to boost food security.

The case was one of many that exposed the dilemma of the country’s food security efforts. The multi-million dollar government-financed scheme that provides seeds and fertilizer to smallholder farmers has fallen short in aiding food production.

The abuse of farming inputs has been a thorn on the government’s side, with officials seeing it as deliberate sabotage of the country’s ambitions to feed itself. At the same time, analysts contend that such government schemes are open to abuse by well-connected individuals.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has redoubled its efforts to boost the production of the staple maize, with the government last year aiming to provide 1,8 million rural households with maize seed and fertilizer.

The bulk of the southern African country’s maize production – up to 70 percent – comes from rural smallholder farmers, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), but it is also here where widespread poverty is rife, with the World Bank noting that almost 8 million people in Zimbabwe earn under USD1 per day.

Such conditions, analysts note, have led to the diversion of farming inputs for reselling, effectively slowing the country’s efforts to feed itself.

During the 2020-21 season, Zimbabwe produced 2.7 million tonnes of maize, triple the previous year thanks to above-normal rains, yet concerns remain about maintaining production levels.

“As the painful experience of the past 20 years since the land reform has shown so clearly, such gains are not necessarily sustained,” said Ian Scoones, an academic and researcher at the University of Sussex’s Institute of Development Studies. He has written widely about agriculture in Zimbabwe.

This 2021-22 season, climate uncertainty has seen many farmers delaying planting as they keep waiting for the rain. The agriculture ministry reported early January that the country had missed its target of 2 million hectares of maize.

According to the ministry, only about 1 million hectares had been planted at the beginning of the year. Under the Agriculture and Food System Transformation Strategy, Zimbabwe targets 8 billion US dollars for agriculture production by 2025.

Grain production has fluctuated in the past two decades. For example, during the 2001 cropping season, about 1.5 million hectares were planted, which represented a 15 percent drop from the previous season according to FAO figures.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) noted that Zimbabwe’s 2021-22 maize harvest, which stood at 2.7 million tonnes, was the highest since the 1984-5 season.

These fluctuations highlight the country’s struggle to feed itself.

The USDA says the bumper harvest was due to “favourable weather conditions,” exposing the limits of government maize and seed subsidies in the largely rain-fed sector.

Analysts say it will take more for the country to realize its goals beyond providing inputs to farmers amid other challenges such as climate uncertainty.

“Government will need to provide incentives, such as food crop production quotas, to large scale farmers who tend to specialize on non-food cash crops, which worsens the food security situation,” said Stanley Mbuka, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

“An unstable currency also makes it hard for smallholder farmers to cushion themselves as they sell to the grain marketing board in the local currency, which loses value very quickly,” Mbuka told IPS.

Researchers have also noted that other innovations to encourage farmers to adopt new methods to boost food production, despite showing promise, have been abandoned for, among other reasons, being too labour intensive.

Much of rural agriculture in Zimbabwe is not mechanized and relies on rainwater.

Added to this is a combination of longer-term underlying factors, including macroeconomic challenges, increased occurrence of climatic shocks, COVID-19 pandemic, and the cumulative effects of two consecutive years of drought, says the World Food Programme (WFP).

“To break the cycle of relapses into food crises, stakeholders are increasingly aware that more investments are needed in resilience-building and early warning,” said Maria Gallar, WFP-Zimbabwe spokesperson.

“The chances that smallholder farmers fall into food insecurity repeatedly decrease if they have access to productive assets such as dams,” Gallar told IPS by email.

Despite last year’s above-average maize harvest, the WFP says the latest figures show that more than 5 million people are estimated to be food insecure. This includes 42 percent of the urban population – about 2.4 million people – where the government has promoted urban farming.

“Sustainable change, after so many years of setbacks, will require continued efforts and time,” Gallar said.

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A maise farmer in her fields last year. This year small-scale farmers are anxiously waiting for an impasse between government and private traders to be resolved so they can get their subsidised fertiliser. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
BLANTYRE, Malawi, Nov 29 2021 (IPS)

Ellena Joseph, a small-scale maize farmer in Chiradzulu District in Southern Malawi, finished preparing her field early in October.

As the first rains start falling in some parts of the country, her anxiety is growing because she is yet to purchase fertiliser because she does not have any money.

Joseph, 63, is one of the 3.7 million farmers the government targets to benefit under the 2021 Agricultural Input Programme (AIP).

In this programme, the government subsidises fertiliser and seeds for small-scale producers who make up more than 80 percent of farmers in Malawi.

The programme has been running since 2005, and every year, it is saddled with challenges – like corruption, non-availability of goods at sales points and delivery hitches.

This year, these challenges are compounded by a rise in prices of fertiliser which shot up by nearly 100 percent.

The impact of the increase has trickled down to the farmers. For every $23 in government subsidies for a 50kg bag of fertiliser, the farmers are contributing about $9. Last year they paid $5.4.

And Joseph is feeling the weight of that rise on her shoulders. First, she needs money to redeem her two bags of fertiliser.

Then, because chaos is the norm at the agro-dealer shop in her area, she has to bribe the clerks or pay some youths to stand in the queue on her behalf. The more the days and nights they stand in the line for her, the more the money she needs to fork out.

Once she buys the fertiliser, she will have to hire a motorbike to transport the commodity to her home, some 17km away.

In total, she needs at least $28 to meet these expenses.

“I don’t have that kind of money, and I don’t know where to get it from,” she tells IPS. “I hope by the time the fertiliser comes, I will have found the money.”

In the previous years, she relied on the government-funded public works programme to earn a small wage. For the past two years, there haven’t been any projects in her area.

Amid the perennial challenges rocking the food subsidy programme intended to ensure food security in Malawi, the rise in fertiliser prices has been the most dramatic.

It all began in June, soon after Parliament passed the national budget in which the government allocated $172,000 towards the programme, targeting 3.7 million farmers – the same number as last year.

Following the hike in price on the global market, the cost of fertiliser increased in the country. Malawi was hit hard. It relies on imports because it does not have a fertiliser manufacturing plant.

In reaction, the Ministry of Agriculture, the implementing agency of the flagship food security programme, announced it would trim the number of beneficiaries.

“Due to financial constraints and the rising prices of fertiliser, the ministry, after looking into these two compound challenges, has decided to have AIP beneficiaries scaled down. It is therefore very necessary that the scaling down of the beneficiaries be done up to village level,” said the ministry’s secretary Sandram Maweru in a circular dated July 21, 2021 and addressed to all 28 district commissioners.

The ministry recommended specific figures from every district, resulting in fewer beneficiaries totalling 2.7 million.

But a week after the district commissioner had submitted the revised data to the ministry, on August 21, President Lazarus Chakwera overturned the decision of his agriculture officials. He directed that no one who was on the list last year could be taken off.

“I will not allow anyone to remove any family or village from the list of beneficiaries,” he said.

And so began a tug of war between the government and private traders.

While the private traders insisted they would need to sell the fertiliser at the new prices, which would have outstripped the budget allocated, the government accused the private traders of inflating the prices to sabotage the programme.

It told them it would buy their fertiliser for AIP at $29 per 50kg bag instead of the $43.6 per 50 kg which the private traders had set for it.

Efforts to resolve the standoff did not yield results. Last week, 13 of the 164 traders the government had engaged had not signed contracts to supply the fertiliser. This amounts to close to a million bags of fertiliser.

In a statement in Parliament on November 18, Minister of Agriculture Lobin Lowe insisted it was up to the traders to take it or leave it while admitting that only 10 percent of the targeted 371,000 metric tonnes had been procured.

The private traders account for 66 percent of the commodity, while two public agencies supply 34 percent for the programme.

However, the fact that 151 traders have signed the contract does not guarantee that the fertiliser will be supplied, indicates Mbawaka Phiri, Executive Administration Officer for the Fertiliser Association of Malawi, a grouping of the private traders.

“Caution must be taken to not assume that all 151 traders have stock and can supply. Many of those who have signed contracts are still having difficulty procuring stock,” she says.

According to Phiri, some private traders have decided not to participate in the programme this year because the AIP fertiliser price is too low to do business.

Traders are not obliged to sign the government’s contract offer – that is a business decision.

“However, it is also up to the government to decide whether the programme can be successful without the participation of suppliers from the private sector. Last year’s programme was successful mainly due to the participation of private suppliers who were able to deliver larger amounts of fertiliser in a very short period and to all areas of the country,” she says.

Agriculture policy expert, Tamani Nkhono-Mvula, says in general, the implementation of the programme this year has not been satisfactory.

“This is November, and we have less than 10 percent of the fertiliser supplied when we were supposed to have at least 50 percent of the farmers reached by mid-October. Once rains start in a matter of weeks, that will compound the logistical challenges we already have,” he says.

He says the programme is crucial because it targets low-income farmers who cannot afford the farm inputs, but its management is concerning.

“It seems the programme has become a way for some people to make money. They would love to see chaos in the programme because that is the way they are able to benefit,” says Nkhono-Mvula.

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Alia Chughtai (standing at the back), a journalist with filmmaker Akhlaque Mahesar (right, behind the table), and others in their team at Aur Chaawal (And Rice). Chughtai believes in using local fresh ingredients that are healthy and planet-friendly. Her method of cooking fits in with the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition’s Double Pyramid. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Nov 19 2021 (IPS)

Balance is the absolute key, says Alia Chughtai, a journalist who started a catering service with filmmaker Akhlaque Mahesar, by the name of Aur Chaawal (And Rice), two years ago.

She knows what she is talking about. Suffering from gastrointestinal issues, Chughtai’s journey towards healthy eating started a decade ago. Once she understood the science behind nutrition and what balance of eating meant, she understood what her body had gone through. And thus began her quest for cleansing it.

“I couldn’t have garlic or onions for eight straight weeks,” the two most essential ingredients one cannot imagine cooking desi (slang for Pakistani) food without, she told IPS.

Two years ago, Chughtai decided to turn her food journey into a small side business.

“I got into this because there was a personal need for clean desi food without the bad oil, chemical-laced spices and food colouring,” she said. Today her fight is against processed food which she believes is the reason behind the multitude of ailments in people, and she swears by “heartily grown vegetables and fruits”.

“But it’s not a solo ride,” she said. For a well-oiled business to run successfully and expand, the pair have divided their tasks. While Chughtai oversees the day-to-day operations and “menu ideation”, Mahesar looks after the background logistics.

Surmai (fish) korma and rice with crispy okra and fried chillies on the side. One of the balanced dishes found at Aur Chaawal. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

While navigating the ‘farm to fork’ path, trying to find the balance between sustainability, nutrition, and access, Mahesar said they try their best “to use locally grown, locally made products”.

In turn, the duo has become acutely aware of fairer returns for small businesses and farmers.

“Ours is a small business, and we are all for supporting other small businesses,” said Chughtai’s partner.

The pandemic also acted as a catalyst for many Pakistanis to think and produce locally.

“We try to source as much as possible from around Pakistan, including the different types of cheeses and even the pasta,” he said.

But looking for quality produce requires quite a bit of research, which they both enjoy doing.

“We get a month’s supply of spices from small towns in Sindh; a certain species of chillies from Muzaffarabad, in the Punjab province; saffron and buckwheat from Hunza, in Gilgit-Baltistan region and saag (mustard plant) from Lahore, also in Punjab. They substitute ghee (a type of clear butter) for oil to cook in, which they get from Matiari, also in Sindh, weekly.

Fayza Khan, president of the Pakistan Nutrition and Dietetic Society (PNDS), strongly feels those in the food business must preach and practice healthy and sustainable eating, advocate for science-based diets, recommend reduced intake of meat and highly processed foods and demand from the government better labelling on packaged food.

To “reduce the burden of malnutrition and non-communicable diseases”, those in the food business should “play their part” in promoting healthier ways of cooking food and minimizing food waste.

Frowning upon overconsumption of fat-laden food, including bakery products, fast food, and sweetened beverages, she said: “Nutrition and lifestyle-related chronic diseases in Pakistan among adults as well as in children including the prevalence of obesity and an onset of diabetes in young age is spreading fast.”

Khan, therefore, recommends “traditional foods” which are healthier if “home-cooked with better cooking techniques”.

Finding the balance between food systems and the planet. Credit: BCFN

And that is what the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) advocates: that healthy diets, especially traditional foods, play a significant role in food sustainability as they have a low environmental impact.

For example, the Mediterranean diet of fresh fruit, vegetables, fish rather than red meat, and cereal-based products, such as pasta, and cooked in olive oil, help prevent heart disease. Little wonder Italians are ranked healthiest in the world. Italy has the highest number of centenarians in Europe.

As Chughtai and Mahesar fine-tuned their business model, they have increasingly understood the integrity of sustainable food strategies and started employing caution to minimize any environmental or climate impact it may be causing.

“As an entrepreneur in the food business, it is our responsibility to reduce greenhouse emissions, of animal welfare and protection of small farmers and workers in the food business,” said Chughtai.

“We initially used bagasse bowls and containers,” she explained but had to opt for cheaper recycled packaging boxes because bagasse was too expensive.

“We use regular reusable plastic boxes which we refill with food for 10% discount on the food,” she said, adding: “People don’t want to pay higher costs for desi cuisine!”

They also compost their wet kitchen waste and use it as manure for their vegetable roof garden, where they grow their red bell peppers, chillies, broccoli, tomatoes, eggplant, gourd, and some herbs.
But Chughtai, says Aur Chaawal, is not just a business; it is a quest for “clean food”.

It took her several years to find out that the root cause of her stomach issues, said Chughtai and said everything pointed toward the pre-packaged spices with their overdose of flavourings and colours. Averse to them, at Aur Chaawal, they use the old-fashioned pestle and mortar to pound fresh garlic, smash the ginger or chillies or grind the whole spices into powder.

“Our cooking may be labour intensive, alright,” she admitted, but insisted it was “clean and healthy”.

Chughtai may not be aware of it, but Aur Chaawal has uses Barilla Foundation’s Double Pyramid model of placing the health and climate pyramids side-by-side, encouraging healthy eating for humans and remaining respectful of the planet.

In a city like Karachi, which has a deluge of caterers, food joints and restaurants and a huge population of discerning gourmands, securing 10,000 followers on Instagram, and a steady daily clientele of between 35-45, in just two years, is no mean feat.

“We have to be innovative,” said Mahesar, but puts their success down to the awareness among their regular customers (that include many working women who want her to cook for their family), that the Aur Chaawal menu will be nothing but wholesome.

The business also caters to those who are counting their calories. But Chughtai insisted a one-size-fits-all formula does not work for here.

On average, she said, every body’s plate should be 1/4th filled with protein, 1/2 with greens and 1/4th with complex carbs”.

But she emphasized: “Everyone is different; you have to eat according to your health needs.”

For instance, on her plate, the portion of protein would be 1/3rd protein since she was low on iron. And this, she said, was the mistake many nutritionists in Pakistan make.

“You cannot apply the 1400/1500 calorie rule to everyone!” said Chughtai, who was fortunate to train under Adrian Leung, a certified nutrition coach and personal trainer and who helped “reconfigure my brain about good food and bad food”.

One day, when her inner writer gets restless, she plans to document her “journey”. She intends to travel from the coastal villages to the mountain peaks and include recipes she picks up “of the unconventional eats and the ones we’ve adapted because Karachi is such a smorgasbord of ethnicities” in a “beautifully designed” compilation.

Till then, having brought up eating home-cooked food made by her mother, she said, Aur Chaawal will continue serving “clean” meals using the healthiest, organically grown produce and spices for their customers.

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