Dairy farmers cry foul, lose markets

Malawi Milk Producers Association says some dairy farmers in the Central Region are struggling to find a market for their milk after the main buyer, Malawi Dairy Industry (MDI) suspended its operations.

The association’s national director Herbert Chagona confirmed the development on Monday, saying this has left more than 5 000 dairy farmers in Dowa, Lilongwe and Mchinji districts stranded as there is no off-taker for their milk.

He said: “Over the past two weeks, the farmers have lost more than 18 000 litres of milk, losing more than K6 million in revenue because of non-collection of milk by Malawi Dairy Industry and this is affecting their households.

“This has aggravated the hardships farmers are going through as farmers have also gone for five months without being paid for the milk the company had collected from the milk bulking groups.”

Chagona said Malawi Dairy Industry, which mainly processes pasteurised milk and yoghurt, has been affected by the intermittent electricity supply which disturbs production.

“As a result, they have ended up throwing out thousands of litres of milk, as such, their cash flow is seriously affected,” he said.

In the meantime, Chagona said the association is engaging small-scale processors, but cannot  absorb all the milk. 

Chagona said the production capacity for the sector is at around 40 percent for all the seven milk processors in the country, including MDI, an indication that the country has potential.

Speaking separately, MDI managing director Bob Dzombe said the firm, which was collecting about 1 000 litres of milk per day against their 90 000 litres processing capacity, is operating at a loss due to power challenges.

He said the firm uses 120 litres diesel per day to power the generators.

On average, milk fetches about K250 per litre while diesel costs K1 920 per litre.This means that the firm was spending about K230 400 on diesel to process milk valued at K250 000.

Said Dzombe: “People are failing to feed the cows for milk, as a result, they are failing to produce more milk.

“For over one year since the country started experiencing power challenges, we have been using more fuel just to process 1 000 litres.”

Data from the 25 000-member association shows that last year, Malawi produced 53 million litres of milk.

Figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO) show that Malawi has the lowest consumption of milk per capita in Africa estimated at four to six kilogrammes (kg). This is below the African continent average of 15kg per capita and is also lower than the 200kg per capita recommended by WHO.

For the past one year, the country has been experiencing intermittent power outages due to the damage of Kapichira Hydro Power Station in Chikwawa by Tropical Cyclone Ana, which took off 130 megawatts from the national power grid.

Last week, Electricity Generation Company reported that they had fixed two machines and added 64.8 megawatts to the national electricity grid.