Farmers of Mwahenga Cooperative in Rumphi District have lost over K9 million of prospective soya beans revenue in a space of three years after several agro-dealers breached terms of business contracts.<\/p>\n
Chairperson of the cooperative, Saviour Nkhonjera, made the revelation in Mzuzu over the weekend, saying the trend has had enormous negative impact on their profit margins.<\/p>\n
According to Khonjera, during the 2013\/2014 and 2014\/2015 growing seasons, the farmers were asked to grow about 30 tonnes of the legume which, at the current market price of K300 per kilogramme, translates to K9 million.<\/p>\n
Speaking when she addressed a farmers\u2019 marketing conference called by the African Institute of Corporate Citizenship (AICC), Nkhojera said contrary to an initial agreement, the buyers demanded that the farmers should find own means of transport to take the commodity to the buyers\u2019 base.<\/p>\n
\u201cCalculating the transport expenditure from Mwahenga, it was too huge for us, so we started diverting the crop to other not-so-profitable uses.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom this year-we do not want verbal contracts. We want everything in writing and signed before a commissioner of oaths. In that way, everyone will be compelled to keep their side of the bargain,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Mwahenga is 100kilometres away from Mzuzu City.<\/p>\n
She bemoaned the tendency of agro-dealers to offer better prices to farmers in the urban areas, while those in the remote areas get poor prices for similar commodities.<\/p>\n
But Project Manager for AICC, MacLoud Kayira, attributed the problem to information gap between farmers and other key players in the value chain.<\/p>\n
He said most farmers do not comprehend the rule of demand and supply, let alone take the buyers\u2019 expectations seriously.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are here to bridge that gap. We have noticed that information flow is very asymmetrical as such, farmers cry year-in, year-out. So we want to build their capacity and also link them to various stakeholders so that they understand the dynamics of agri-business,\u201d Kayira said.<\/p>\n
Agricultural research shows that with the troubled tobacco market, crops such as legumes, cotton and tea have potential to sustain Malawi\u2019s ailing economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Farmers of Mwahenga Cooperative in Rumphi District have lost over K9 million of prospective soya beans revenue in a space of three years after several agro-dealers breached terms of business contracts. Chairperson of the cooperative, Saviour Nkhonjera, made the revelation in Mzuzu over the weekend, saying the trend has had enormous negative impact on their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28259","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\/28259","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=28259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28264,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28259\/revisions\/28264"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}