The National Food Reserves Agency (NRFA) says it will import be-tween 9 000 and 20 000 metric tonnes (MT) of maize from Tanzania because the locally available grain is fetching high prices.
NFRA chief executive officer George Macheka said this yesterday when the Agriculture Committee of Parliament visited its Limbe of-fices in Blantyre where committee members were shocked to see an empty warehouse.
Addressing the parliamentarians, Macheka, who admitted that its Southern Region warehouse has only 480MT, said it was keeping the maize in its silos at Kanengo, but was quick to add that it will import some from Tanzania.
He said: “We did not buy maize in the Southern Region because of El-Nino weather.
“This warehouse only keeps 5 000MT and the maize that we dis-patched earlier for Agricultural Development and Marketing Cor-poration [Admarc] came from this warehouse.”
Macheka said NFRA has in in excess of 50 000MT after distrib-uting 56 000MT through the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (Dodma) since September 2024.
He said the remaining 50 000MT was enough for January, February and mid-March but they are in the process of importing between 9 000MT and 20 000MT to supplement the remaining months.
“The maize is selling at K1 200 per kilogramme (kg) in the country, which would not be sustainable. We have K8 billion in our account and we are expecting another K15 billion and that will take us to K23 billion,” said Macheka.
In his remarks, the committee’s vice-chairperson Ulemu Chilapondwa expressed satisfaction with Macheka’s explanation.
He said: “Currently maize prices have gone high because only vendors are on the market. We also wanted to check from NFRA on how much they have to carry us through the lean period.
“We are happy that NFRA has taken a step further to purchase even from a sister company in Tanzania because they can’t find the intended stocks within the country.”
Dodma director of disaster preparedness and response the Reverend Moses Chimphepo said the department was making progress in the hunger response both in resource mobilisation and distribu-tion of relief food and cash transfers.
“We have so far secured $148 million [K257 billion] for the hunger response. The response is estimated to cost $197 million [K343 billion] to support all 5.7 million people affected by hunger,” he said.
