Malawi’s Unfulfilled Promise: The Impact of Coffee Wilt Disease and Subsidies on Coffee Production | 25, Issue 16
Malawi, with roughly 18 million inhabitants today, is a tiny stretch of country in southeast Africa, squeezed between its larger neighbors, Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique.
DEOGRACIAS KALIMA explores the complex history and state of coffee growing in Malawi.
In 1859, Dr. David Livingstone—a famous Scottish missionary and explorer—arrived in Malawi, which eventually led to the colonization of the country as a British territory in 1891. It achieved independence in 1964, but rampant corruption and low literacy rates have made it one of the world’s poorest nations: Malawi derives up to 40 percent of its budget needs from donors.[1]
Coffee didn’t arrive in Malawi until the late 1800s, brought not by Dr. Livingstone but by John Buchanan. A fellow Scot and horticulturalist, Buchanan brought a Nyasa species from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh to test in the country’s soil.
Malawi—the second largest tea producer in Africa—has a perfect subtropical climate and dark, fertile soils that should enable it to be a coffee giant, too. But coffee wilt disease (CWD) and state subsidies for maize and legumes have combined to stunt what has the potential to be one of Africa’s enterprising coffee-cultivation regions.
“This is the coffee killer,” sighs Mariam Nata, 40, stashing a branch of shriveled coffee leaves from a ruined tree into a fire. We are on a rural plot in Mzuzu, a northern Malawi district, and the country’s so-called “coffee-belt.”
Attributed to the Gibberella xylarioides fungus, CWD is the menace of growers across Central Africa (including Uganda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), but especially in Malawi. Waves of CWD outbreaks have repeatedly shattered small-scale and commercial growers across Central Africa since the 1920s, leading to farm abandonments, yield losses, and the ripping up of coffee trees to plant more resilient crops like tea.[2] Over time, the disease has inflicted a US$1 billion loss on coffee farmers across the continent.[3] And the disease doesn’t discriminate: it afflicts both arabica and robusta.
“This is the disease that eats up Africa’s coffee, but from the 1930s in countries like Kenya, it has been fairly suppressed via the use of genetic tree resistance and wide- scale fumigation on farms. However, the disease is stubborn, and in Malawi, coupled with general farm mismanagement, CWD almost wiped out cultivation in the ’80s and ’90s among smallholder rural farmers,” says Daniel Moketi, a state agronomist from the Malawi ministry of agriculture who works with farmers in the Lake Malawi district.
The pathogen behind CWD thrives in tropical soil, which Malawi has in abundance, says Moketi. The commercial fungicides typically used to control the pathogen are expensive to import, making it difficult to control its spread, although some less expensive methods have shown promise. The use of “antagonistic biological control agents,” like the growing of organic parasitic plants beneath coffee trees, helps coffee plants to fight the disease by enabling them to evolve their own immunity.
“For Malawi growers, access to organic and inorganic fertilizers and pesticides at market prices is very expensive because these have to be largely imported from South Africa. Controlling CWD has always been hard, thus leading many small-scale growers to give up,” says Moketi.
Storied but Troubled
Coffee cultivation in Malawi has a storied but troubled legacy. First, the country, thanks to its quasi-tropical climate and soil, is famous for being a producer of Chombe, one of Africa’s most reputable tea-growing regions.[4]
“The success of tea, making Malawi Africa’s second- biggest[5] producer, and the [mild] climate that sustains tea, means Malawi should have been a formidable coffee producer, too. In geography we say where the tea plant thrives, coffee does easily, too,” explains Nigel Nyusi, the coffee berries storage manager with Zonali Coffee Association, a grouping of 90 rural, small-scale growers in Shire Highlands, southern Malawi.
Increasing coffee production can benefit Malawi in numerous ways. First, Malawi coffee can penetrate specialty markets because of its perceived good flavor. Moketi suggests that “Malawi can follow the footsteps of Kenya and set up its own domestic coffee commodities exchange, an auction like the Nairobi Coffee Exchange,[6] and garner better export prices rather than simply the harvest-from-farm, straight- to-export model.”
Second, greater investment in coffee production could wean Malawi away from the environmentally damaging reality of monoculture. Maize gobbles up to 70 percent of all cultivation land[7] in Malawi and is a water-intensive crop. In addition, household hunger deepens in years where maize fails, because serious backup crops like coffee are not getting enough attention.
When the European settlers in British Malawi (formerly known as Nyasaland) started dabbling with coffee cultivation on small landholdings, it sparked the interest of Black African Malawians. By the 1950s, groups of smallholder Black farmers had jumped significantly onto the coffee-growing bandwagon.
Coffee in Malawi is grown in the northern, southern, and central regions of the country, but the south is the most prominent commercial cultivator.
“What fueled interest in coffee, apart from climate and soil, was the colonial plantation owners’ habit of doling out coffee plants as wage supplements to African workers who went on to plant the crop in their yards,” says Moketi.
Baffling Insignificance
It is baffling, however, that coffee, one of Malawi’s earliest export crops in the twentieth century, has remained significantly small today compared to the maize, tea, tobacco, and legume crops for which Malawi is now globally famous and is proficient in growing. Despite an increasing interest in coffee that resulted in a production of 8,160 tons in 1992, Malawi’s 2019 coffee production only just exceeded 11,000 tons in 2019.[8] This is a change in production of just 29 percent over 27 years. In contrast, Malawi’s tea output saw a high of 28,000 tons in 1992; in 2019, it reached over 49,000 tons.[9]
“It’s the mystery question. Tea is the cousin of coffee. Where tea has flourished in Malawi, why has coffee underperformed?” ponders Moketi.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, repeated outbreaks of CWD greatly damaged the fledgling coffee industry in Malawi, effected losses, and dampened the enthusiasm of cultivators.
CWD is merciless, says Chanda Muporyi, a chemist- assistant who sells pesticides to rural coffee associations in a small, family-run retail store in Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial capital. “It quickly kills off an infected coffee tree in under six months. Berries ripen fast in substandard conditions,” says Muporyi. “I remember the major outbreak of 1990–91. It was quite vicious. Small- scale growers lost thousands of trees and most never bothered to plant again.”
Subsidies Kill Coffee Cherries
Where CWD has hammered Malawi’s coffee ambitions, agricultural subsidies have further suppressed coffee prosperity.
“The politics of agricultural subsidies have landed a fatal blow on Malawi’s coffee. From independence in 1964, the Malawi government has always provided support on maize, tobacco, and bean farming through financial subsidies of fertilizers, maize, and legume seed–and shunned coffee,” says Shamiso Mupara, a forestry academic at the University of Botswana.[10] Mupara also works as an independent consultant with rural communities to restore food forests in Malawi, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.
In particular, the political and financial nature of maize subsidies has conspired to disrupt coffee growth in Malawi. Although subsidies had been offered by the government since the country’s independence, the maize subsidy program took a more aggressive approach, beginning in the mid-2000s with the launch of the “Farm Input Subsidy Program.” With free fertilizers, bio-fortified seeds, and some tillage help for small-scale farmers in Malawi, the program vastly accelerated maize output in an effort to decrease household hunger—and was praised for doubling Malawi’s maize harvest, bringing it from two million tons in 2004 to four million tons in 2014.[11] But subsidies are not an absolute solution. While the maize subsidies had a significant impact from 2004 to 2014, the rate of maize production fell back to 2.8 million shortly after. It’s also important to note that the input distribution of maize subsidies in Malawi favor men, thus putting women farmers in an even weaker[12] earnings position. Maize is also a highly volatile crop in terms of producer price: when maize prices tumble, Malawi’s farmers get burnt.
“The maize subsidies in Malawi, and across much of Africa, are a perfect example of a noble initiative that became the poison for coffee expansion,” explains Mupara. “Small-scale farmers were ignoring coffee bushes, swayed by the popularity of maize. Why wait for a coffee tree that matures in two years when there is subsidized maize that you can sell forward for even bigger profit?”
In Malawi, subsidies for maize and legumes, which divert precious coffee farmers toward maize, have been used by successive regimes since 1964 to garner millions of votes.
“The problem of coffee in Malawi is twofold. First, coffee in Malawi is seen within the prism of being a colonial, elitist crop whose produce is hardly consumed locally but largely exported to Belgium, South Africa, and the UK, whereas maize is the staple diet for millions of Malawians. So maize subsidies in Malawi equal more cash for rural farmers and guaranteed votes for whoever is in power—but drain farmers away from crops seen as ‘difficult’ and ‘elitist’ like coffee,” says Yekai Phiri, the shadow agriculture minister for Malawi Democratic Party, an opposition party whose stance is to discontinue agriculture subsidies and let rural farmers stand on their own.
Today, Malawi’s government is trying to diversify the country’s crop variety base and to urge disappointed farmers to reconsider coffee, but the lure of maize with its lavish subsidies[13] puts coffee at the periphery. And the threat of CWD is always lurking: recent supply chain shortages and the rising costs of shipping agricultural inputs like fertilizers and fungicides may continue to stunt coffee harvests in the near future. Malawi, being a landlocked country geographically, is more vulnerable to the costs of importing tools to fight CWD just as much as the costs of shipping its coffee abroad. ◇
DEOGRACIAS KALIMA is a Malawian journalist reporting on agriculture, rural livelihoods, climate change, and the environment.
References
[1] Daniel Wroe, “Donors, dependency, and political crisis in Malawi,” African Affairs, 111, no. 442 (2021):135–44, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adr076.
[2] Julie Flood, Coffee Wilt Disease. CABI, UK (April 2010).
[3] Flood, Coffee Wilt Disease.
[4] Oswald T. Brown, “Chombe tea officially attains international status,” The Washington Informer (April 24, 2019), https://www.washingtoninformer.com/chombe-tea- officially-attains-international-status/.
[5] “Malawi Tea 2020: Revitalization program towards living wage,” The Sustainable Trade Initiative (September 24, 2018), https://www.idhsustainabletrade.com/publication/malawi- tea-2020-2 /.
[6] https://nairobicoffeeexchange.co.ke/.
[7] Adam M. Komarek, Jawoo Koo, Beliyou Haile, Siwa Msangi, and Carlo Azzarri, “Trade-offs and synergies between yield, labor, profit, and risk in Malawian maize-based cropping systems,” Agronomy for Sustainable Development 38, no. 32 (2018), https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s13593-018-0506-6.
[8] “Malawi – Green coffee production quantity,” Knoema, https:// knoema.com/atlas/ Malawi/topics/ Agriculture/Crops-Production-Quantity-tonnes/ Coffee-production.
[9] “Malawi – Crops » Items » Tea – Production,” Knoema, https:// knoema.com/ FAOPRDSC2020/ production-statistics-crops-crops- processed?tsId=1207390.
[10] Shamiso Winnet Mupara, “An integrated waste management approach as an alternative domestic solid waste management strategy for the growing African urban environments: A case study of Gaborone, Botswana,” UBRISA (University of Botswana Research, Innovation and Scholarship Archive) (2016), https://ubrisa.ub.bw/ handle/10311/2048.
[11] Andy Currier, The failure of input subsidies and a new path forward to fight hunger in Malawi,
Oakland Institute (January 23, 2020), https://www. oaklandinstitute.org/ blog/malawi-failure-input-subsidies-new-path-forward-fight-hunger.
[12] Dieter von Fintel, Anja Smith, Francesca Marchetta, and Martin Limbikani Mwale, “Malawi’s farm subsidies aren’t helping women: But there are solutions,” The Conversation (April 27, 2021), https://theconversation.com/malawis-farm- subsidies-arent-helping-women-but-there-are- solutions-158846.
[13] Gladys Nthenda, “Maize prices to be subsidized to cushion people from COVID-19—Chakwera,” KULINJI.com (January 24, 2021), https:// kulinji.com/ article/news/ 2021 /maize-prices-be-subsidized- cushion-people-covid-19-chakwera.
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