{"id":27277,"date":"2016-07-02T09:28:25","date_gmt":"2016-07-02T07:28:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.times.mw\/?p=27277"},"modified":"2016-07-02T09:28:25","modified_gmt":"2016-07-02T07:28:25","slug":"hooked-on-the-tawny-leaf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/2016\/07\/02\/hooked-on-the-tawny-leaf\/","title":{"rendered":"Hooked on the tawny leaf"},"content":{"rendered":"

Malawi\u2019s efforts to break its chronic dependency on its tobacco industry are struggling to get off the ground, report Collins Mtika and Marius M\u00fcnstermann <\/strong><\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t smoke, but Erisa Chisenga will have absorbed as much nicotine as a chain smoker by the end of the day. It\u2019s harvest season, and the tobacco plants are shoulder-high on Chisenga\u2019s field. He plucks it leaf by leaf until nothing but the bare stems remain.<\/p>\n

Every day, he toils in his field of a hundred square metres \u2014 his hectare of hope. He entered the industry five years ago in the expectation of a better life for himself, his wife and five children.<\/p>\n

Chisenga is one of the 400 000 tobacco farmers in Malawi, the world\u2019s most tobacco-dependent country. Seventy-five percent of the population relies directly or indirectly on the tawny leaf.<\/p>\n

He is under contract to Alliance One, one of the world\u2019s largest raw tobacco merchants. Its main customers are Philip Morris (Marlboro) and British American Tobacco (Lucky Strike).<\/p>\n

The farmers receive the inputs for cultivation on credit. The tricky part comes when they have to pay back their loans, as few Malawians smoke and the bulk of the tobacco is exported.<\/p>\n

This is a time when large amounts of money flow into Malawi and the currency appreciates against the dollar \u2013 meaning that the farmers must repay more than they originally borrowed. They lose much of their expected profit, while the companies benefit.<\/p>\n

Labour costs in such a labour-intense sector are enormous \u2014 only once in five years of growing tobacco has Chisenga made a small profit.<\/p>\n

Minister of Finance Goodall Gondwe says tobacco is \u201chighly political\u201d and that the hurly-burly of the sales season cannot belie the fact that the country needs to break its dependency on it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe times of tobacco are doomed,\u201d Gondwe warned. He was referring to the steady drop in global consumption because of the anti-smoking lobby and declining orders for the Malawian product, which has made the buyers more selective.<\/p>\n

The NGO Unfair Tobacco estimates that an additional 750 000 people could be fed, if food was grown on Malawi\u2019s tobacco farms.<\/p>\n

But paradoxically, one of the key aid initiatives is working with the tobacco industry, despite its claims to be promoting food security.<\/p>\n

The goal of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN) \u2014 initiated in 2012 by the G8, the club of the world\u2019s wealthiest industrial nations \u2014 is to lift 50-million people out of poverty in 11 African countries within 10 years through public private partnerships (PPPs).<\/p>\n

It brings together the G8 member states with a who\u2019s who of multinational business: Nestl\u00e9, Heineken, Coca-Cola, Bayer, Syngenta, Monsanto, Standard Bank.<\/p>\n

They plan to invest more than $11-billion up to 2022, kick-starting a \u201cgreen revolution\u201d. In Malawi, the initiative is intended to help 1.7-million people, a tenth of the population.<\/p>\n

But among the companies aboard the NAFSN initiative in Malawi are the tobacco merchants<\/p>\n

Alliance One \u2014 the company Chisenga supplies \u2014 and Limbe Leaf, a subsidiary of Universal Corporation, another global giant.<\/p>\n

Together these companies buy and process up to 90 percent of Malawi\u2019s annual tobacco harvest.<\/p>\n

In cooperation with the NAFSN they want to expand their business. Alliance One wants to fund private tobacco research and to acquire new land, doubling its estates from a current 61 000 to 121 000 hectares.<\/p>\n

Ronald Ngwira, leaf production manager at Alliance One argues that the solution is \u201c(agricultural) diversification with tobacco\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre we a tobacco company or are we a food company?\u201d he asks. He says that the company provides farmers with seed, fertiliser and pesticide for maize as well as tobacco \u2013 although all inputs come in the form of loans.<\/p>\n

Implementing the New Alliance initiative in Malawi is the European Union. Yet the German EU delegate, Maria Heubuch of the Greens party, recently urged the EU to halt its support to NAFSN in Malawi, arguing that the cooperation with tobacco companies is one of the initiative\u2019s \u201cworst failings\u201d.<\/p>\n

Heubuch sharply questions the ability of mega- PPPs such as the NAFSN to contribute to poverty reduction and food security, saying the poorest communities risk bearing the brunt of social and environmental risks associated with it.<\/p>\n

In an interview, she said she regards the New Alliance as \u201ca door-opener for multinationals\u201d.<\/p>\n

She pointed out that the companies\u2019 business practices are highly opaque. Their \u201cletters of intent\u201d were not accessible to the public or delegates of the European Parliament like Heubuch herself, making it hard to keep track of their investments.<\/p>\n

She added that in cases, the companies\u2019 initial intention to support local people has shifted into something different. One example is Mpatsa Farms which aimed to grow rice, cotton, soya and maize under NAFSN but later \u201cstopped and channelled resources to tobacco farming\u201d, according to the New Alliance\u2019s 2014 progress report.<\/p>\n

However, the German government continues to support the NAFSN, injecting a cool 500-million euros (R8.5-billion) in 2013.<\/p>\n

The Germans have assigned the Association for International Cooperation (GIZ) to help wean Malawian farmers from tobacco growing.<\/p>\n

GIZ regards itself as the partner of the private sector, with its Malawi director, Matthias Rompel, dropping phrases such as: \u201cAgriculture needs to become agro- business\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can help the economy without having to deal too much with the government,\u201d Rompel says.<\/p>\n

GIZ is about to set up a \u201cgreen innovation centre\u201d at the Agriculture Research and Extension Trust (ARET), which was founded by the Malawian government and the Tobacco Association of Malawi to develop new tobacco strains and teach farmers how to grow tobacco.<\/p>\n

Rompel insists that GIZ is not working with the tobacco industry, while the Malawi government has designated ARET as a core institution for the implementation of its new National Export Strategy, which calls on farmers to grow oil seed crops.<\/p>\n

ARET has committed itself to its new \u201cDiversification Strategic Plan\u201d aimed at fostering alternatives to tobacco.<\/p>\n

But doubts persist. ARET\u2019s \u201ckey consultations\u201d with representatives of various industries included talks with Japan Tobacco International and local tobacco market leaders Limbe Leaf and Alliance One.<\/p>\n

It is against this background that Laura Graen of Unfair Tobacco complains that \u201cthe tobacco industry has hijacked the term \u2018diversification\u2019 and re-coined it for its own purposes\u201d.<\/p>\n

Among the \u201cweaknesses\u201d of its diversification efforts, ARET itself lists: \u201cBiasness (sic) on tobacco (that) will negatively affect the efforts to actively engage itself on other high-value crops\u201d.<\/p>\n

Tobacco continues to be central to ARET\u2019s finances. Malawi\u2019s tobacco farmers are required to contribute one percent of their income to ARET, and its diversification plan identifies over-dependence on the tobacco levy as \u201canother weakness\u201d.<\/p>\n

A document dealing with the GIZ\u2019s cooperation with ARET bluntly states that \u201cARET is financed by tobacco sales\u201d.<\/p>\n

In a poor country with persistent budget woes, there are no easy alternatives. \u201cSourcing funds for research and extension in tobacco from most traditional funding agencies is almost impossible,\u201d notes the diversification strategy.<\/p>\n

Last year GIZ invested 140 000 euros in ARET and plans to put in a further 200 000 euros this year. Originally intended to end next year, the support programme is to be extended until 2019.<\/p>\n

A good portion of the money, according to GIZ statistics, has been used to train ARET\u2019s staff in how to grow oil seed crops. Yet only 5 percent of ARET\u2019s 40 staff members have been trained in this area so far.<\/p>\n

Reality check with our tobacco farmer Chisenga. He agrees that it would be better to grow something other than tobacco, but adds: \u201cWhat we need is cash.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year Alliance One bought Chisenga\u2019s tobacco harvest at one US dollar per kilogramme. This was worse than making no profit \u2014 Chisenga failed to repay the loan and sank into debt.<\/p>\n

With the substitution programme struggling to take off, tobacco remains his best bet. Somehow, he\u2019ll have to keep his hopes up until next season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malawi\u2019s efforts to break its chronic dependency on its tobacco industry are struggling to get off the ground, report Collins Mtika and Marius M\u00fcnstermann He doesn\u2019t smoke, but Erisa Chisenga will have absorbed as much nicotine as a chain smoker by the end of the day. It\u2019s harvest season, and the tobacco plants are shoulder-high […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27282,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27277\/revisions\/27282"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}