Floods signal bumper yields

It is a hot Saturday morning nearly a month after floods washed Fanny Mtopa’s knee-high maize crop into Mwanza River.

Tropical Cyclone Ana, which affected almost 900 000 Malawians in 16 districts, reduced Namatchowa Village to ruins.

The settlement is dotted with homes shattered to rubble and fields buried in silt.

Here, visitors are welcomed by the locals’ lamentations for livestock and assets gone with floods as well as worsening hunger.

But rebuilding is well underway in floodplains along the hugely silted river.

The clangour of hammers and sights of villagers rebuilding on mounds of broken homes personify a community rising from the worst tragedy.

However, for Fanny Mtopa, rebuilding is running side by side with replanting.

“There is no better time to replant,” she says. “As the floodwater recedes, it leaves behind abundant moisture and fertile alluvial soils which help us harvest more.”

Mtopa was seen replanting in her field almost 100 metres away from Mwanza River, which “floods at will”. The river is choked by topsoil from villages along its course.

Tropical Cyclone Ana triggered the fourth devastating floods in the lowland since 2015.

Mtopa says climate change has made such disasters more frequent and devastating in the past two decades.

The Department of Disaster Management Affairs (Dodma) reports that Tropical Storm Ana destroyed 78 000 hectares of crops belonging to some 222 000 families in six districts.

They urgently need seed of fast-maturing crops as well as potato vines and cassava cuttings, Dodma reports.

But Mtopa has replanted recycled maize from food aid distributed at a camp for displaced persons in her village.

“I cannot afford modern seed, having lost everything to floods that wiped away my promising crop and left me with nothing,” she states.

Thousands in Chikwawa were struggling to overcome hunger and impoverishing effects of Cyclone Idai, which occurred in 2019, when Tropical Storm Ana struck.

Mtopa hoped in vain for a bumper harvest following two years of prolonged drought, which ramped up food scarcity and prices in the Shire Valley.

“Last year, I only harvested enough maize to fill an oxcart because the rainy season started in December and dry spells kicked in late in January. The floods have dashed my hopes,” she laments.

And the cyclone-laden growing season started late.

The vast valley received the first rains mid-January when floods triggered by a less storied rainstorm displaced hundreds just over a week before Tropical Storm Ana arrived from Madagascar.

“The floods have dashed our hope for a break from hunger caused by drought and pest attacks,” says the woman, whose hybrid maize was annihilated by the floods.

Her nephew Peterstone Mtopa says buts and what-ifs persist as cyclones keep battering the lowland at the southern tip of Malawi.

He leaves the evacuation camp early in the morning to do piecework in crop-fields of better-off neighbours in a desperate attempt to feed his displaced family.

“We cannot tell if these last floods or there are more to come, but the moisture and fertile soils from the floods assure us of a good harvest if only the floods do not recur.”

For the peasant farmer, there is a silver lining in the cloud after the devastating storm.

“When floods occur, we get high maize, millet and sorghum yields without applying chemical fertiliser, which costs about K40 000 for a bag weighing 50 kilogrammes. This is pivotal to beating hunger,” he explains.