‘GM cotton can do well in most parts of Malawi’

A renowned plant breeder, Dr Moses Maliro, says genetically modified (GM) cotton can do well in most parts of the country if it is planted at the onset of the first rains.

Maliro, who works at Bunda College, a constituent college of Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (Luanar), said cotton can transform the economy if it is up-scaled in most areas of the country.

He said cotton fetches good prices at the market compared to other crops such as groundnuts and beans.

Maliro said, if planted in December, farmers can harvest the crop between April and May when the weather is still warm and that could also give them time to grow other crops between June and September.

“For a long time, we have been doing cotton trials here at Bunda and the results have been impressive. The coming in of BT cotton should give farmers hope that they can take advantage of it and grow it in areas where it is generally warm,” said Maliro in an interview last week, on the sidelines of a visit by traditional leaders to the confined field trials for the crop at the college.

One of the proponents of GM cotton, Professor Moses Kwapata, said the trials have gone on well and that all the stakeholders who have visited the site are satisfied with the trials.

“We had visitors from many institutions including Farmers Union of Malawi, Parliament, the Cotton Development Trust, government as well as representatives from other countries such as Zimbabwe and the United States of America.

“All the visitors are happy with the way we handled the trials and it is our hope that farmers will benefit from the GM cotton,” he said.

Kwapata said the GM cotton, apart from helping the country generate forex, will help farmers reduce costs because it does not require more pesticides.

“In conventional cotton, farmers spray over 10 times, but GM cotton requires less pesticides and farmers save a lot of money,” he said.

Senior T/A Chadza of Lilongwe was impressed with the performance of the GM cotton and urged government to scale it up so that farmers can planted in his area.

“What we have seen is that the crop can do well even in Lilongwe and this gives us hope that apart from depending on tobacco, maize, groundnuts and beans as cash crops, we can also grow cotton. This will eventually give us good options in case one crop does not do well,” he said.

The BT cotton confined field trials commenced in January and are expected to be rolled-out in the cotton growing districts of Chikhwawa, Salima, Nsanje and Balaka later in the year.