There are fears that cotton output will plummet further this season to 3 000 metric tonnes (MT) from last season’s 6 000 MT following the drastic drop in the number of registered farmers.
The drop, according to Cotton Farmers Association of Malawi (Cofam), follows frustrations among some farmers due to the rising cost of inputs and difficulties to access their payment because of technical challenges during the past season when the sector piloted digital payment system.
Among others, the Cotton Management Information System uses mobile money and bank accounts to pay farmers, replacing the traditional cash-based manual system, but there were cases of funds being transferred to wrong people.
In an interview yesterday, Cofam president Labson Zidana said such cases affected many of his colleagues who have since diversified to other crops, threatening the crop’s output this season.
He said: “This season’s production will be far less than last year. We expect cotton output to be between 3 000MT and 4 000MT because most farmers have not grown cotton.
“The registered farmers range between 6 000 and 7 000 from between 22 000 and about 23 000 last year. The main reason is that many farmers were frustrated with technical challenges faced when selling last season and rising cost of inputs.”
Zidana, a long-time cotton farmers, said although the locally multiplied seed had high germination rate and weather conditions are better in the cotton-growing areas considering the crop’s resilience to drought, output will remain low because of the reduced number of farmers.
Cotton Council of Malawi spokesperson Prisca Jamali was not immediately available for comment yesterday, but in an earlier interview she confirmed the dampened output from last season, which saw output dropping by 25 percent from 8 000MT to 6 000MT.
Meanwhile, the country’s four ginners, namely, Masapa, Malawi Cotton Company, Afrisian Ginners Limited and Admarc Limited have mostly been underutilising their ginning capacity due to low supply of the crop for the past 10 years.
For instance, Malawi Cotton Company field manager Yohane Jim said in an interview yesterday that they have only been accessing about 3 000MT or less of cotton against its production capacity of about 30 000MT, a situation which is proving costly to sustain.
“As ginners, we did not have access to see the registration records, but on the ground, the number of cotton farmers had sharply dropped,” he said.
In an interview, agricultural policy expert Leonard Chimwaza said lack of political will, proper industry player collaboration and weak regulatory environment are killing the cotton sector.
Since 2010 when cotton output reached 100 000MT, production has averaged about 10 000MT for the past decade with last year recorded at about 8 000MT, raking in $3 million (about K5.9 billion).
