Despite a recent research from MwAPATA Institute highlighting the huge potential for the country’s bananas on the export market, farmers have cried foul saying their enterprises are being hampered by lack of adequate capital injection to boost their capacities to meet the demand.
The Policy prioritisation value chain (PPVC) deep dive final results by the Malawian-led agricultural policy research revealed the need for the country to prioritise Soya, bananas and poultry value chains.
Although the research findings have excited them but according to the farmers interviewed, the challenge is capital investment.
Jean Ndalo Mpanyula a banana farmer from Passion for plants along Bunda road at Guzani confessed that being a long-term investment, in the first year she faced a long of challenges.
She indicated that it requires one to have enough financial muscle for a grower to succeed and in her case; she is majoring in organic which is not easy.
Nonetheless, she is grateful to her husband who has been very supportive towards her business and coupled with her gardening and landscaping background, it was therefore easy to get his support.
She stressed that it’s hard for most women to succeed in organic banana production as it is quite costly.
Within three months with proper planning and management, she managed to have suckers and did de-sucking, leaving only three plants per planting station adding the returns start from the suckers as she was able to sell them to some farmers.
“The big challenge is how to maximize on our potential on purchasing more land and the irrigation system due to weather conditions and the rain patterns that we always experience; we need to boost our watering with irrigation. So the big challenge is on how to have enough funds for the irrigation.
“For example to have a borehole drilling it’s almost K5 million; that is before the purchasing of the pump, the tank and the rest. So for a smallholder farmer to have K10 million it’s not a joke. The big challenge is with the government through the Ministry of Agriculture and the private sector maybe to provide loans on how we can have access of the water pump” lamented Mpanyula
Going forward, she is looking to have a lot of hectares in four years’ time so that she can have big tonnage to meet the market demands locally and even for export.
“I feel so bad about the bananas that are being imported from the neighbouring countries yet we have a lot of land that is just idle. I’m looking into empowering more farmers so that they can venture into banana farming; on how I can encourage them to have long term investment like bananas.
“Those people that are in horticulture they only like vegetable mangoes and the like because the banana it takes time to have the fruits and to benefit from it. So I’m trying to find ways on how I can encourage others to be in the banana production so that we can meet the demand.”
Another farmer Goodswin Simwaka from Jenda Mzimba described the journey as not an easy one.
Although the rewards are there from the returns in the investment explaining that he has managed to employ people and make sustainable food availability at household level.
He however said banana is a crop which requires a lot of investment in irrigation, fertilizer and pest control with some materials not locally available.
Simwaka described the period Malawi imported a lot of the crop due to banana bunchy top disease which nearly killed the industry over the last two decades as a lost opportunity.
“It was an opportunity but because banana is a capital intensive crop, we failed to capitalise on that because of limited resources. We who are economically making gains, if only the government can give us loans, then we’ll be able to finance and boost our production then be able to fiancé and boost our repay without hassles.”
