Treasury ups anchor farms, inputs budget

 There are mixed fortunes for the agriculture sector as Teasury has increased budget allocation to anchor farms and agricultural inputs, but has slashed allocation to irrigation development and agricultural diversification, according to budget documents.

Budget Document 5 Draft Estimates of Expenditure on Recurrent and Capital Budget for the Financial Year 2024/25 shows that the budget allocation to irrigation development has dropped by 45.8 percent from K176.4 billion to K95.6 billion.

The drop could potentially undermine the country’s drive to enhance resilience to weather-related shocks and boost food security through winter cropping, which Minister of Agriculture Sam Kawale said can help solve some of the country’s pressing problems.

But in an interview, he said mechanisation and irrigation will be key to initiatives such as winter cropping.

“To do that, we need to promote irrigation. The advantage of irrigation is that it takes care of the problems that we are facing nowadays such as prolonged dry spells,” he said.

 Likewise, government’s allocation to agricultural diversification, an initiative widely considered key to Malawi’s goal of creating additional value chains to complement traditional exports such as tobacco and tea, has dropped by 66.7 percent from KK69.4 billion to K23.1 billion in the 2024/25 budget.

However, the budget for anchor farms, under which the megafarms project will run and agriculture markets, have risen from K688 million to K4.8 billion and K27.6 billion to K161.8 billion, respectively.

The budget for agricultural inputs has also gone up from K109.8 billion to K161.1 billion, presumably to compensate for the 44

 percent devaluation of the kwacha effected in November last year and the rising costs of inputs that are expected to follow.

Reacting to the allocation, Agriculture Research and Extension Trust executive director Albert Changaya said investment in extension services is key to ensuring that farmers have the right tools and technologies to effectively transition to other value chains.

He said the development of structured agricultural markets for the other value chains makes it easier for farmers to sell their products.

Said Changaya: “At the moment, there isn’t adequate support for farmers to diversify into other value chains.

“The problem is that other crops aside from tobacco and maize do not have structured markets and value chains.”

Economics Association of Malawi acting president Bertha Bangara-Chikadza said the reduced allocations to irrigation development may undermine the country’s drive to winter cropping, but stressed that the allocations are smaller because most projects are in their final phases.

She said most of the funding to irrigation development was disbursed through the Shire Valley Transformation Project in Chikwawa which is going into its last phase.

Bangara-Chikadza urged the government to avoid politicising the mega farms.

Agriculture productivity and commercialisation is one of the three keys pillars of Malawi 2063, the country’s long-term strategy to turn Malawi into a lower middle-income economy by 2030