In yet another year of food shortage, Elizabeth Kadyamphungo\u2019s garden stands out and everyone in the village is talking about it.<\/p>\n
Hardly a day goes by without passers-by making envious comments about the one-and-a-half-hectare cassava garden in the village of Malensoma around Jokala, Traditional Authority Malemia in Zomba.<\/p>\n
As Malawi continues to reel from the effects of maize shortage after another year of poor harvest of the staple crop, the garden lends support to those who say the nation can survive on other food crops.<\/p>\n
And the healthy cassava crop that is fascinating people on a daily basis has convinced Kadyamphungo, 34, that hunger can be averted if Malawians listen to calls to diversify into other food crops.<\/p>\n
The single mother of three, who also dabbles in music, says cassava is one crop that requires less money and labour to grow, but has many benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cCassava does not require fertilizer as is the case with maize. Besides, it is not labour intensive, but has a lot of benefits,\u201d says Kadyamphungo, who expects to fill a five-ton pick-up after harvest.<\/p>\n
She says Malawi would not have been desperately looking for food to feed nearly half of its population if the country embraced other food crops, instead of relying on maize alone.<\/p>\n
Malawi faces a hazard-related food security and nutrition emergency for the period July 2016 to March 2017, according to the national Food Insecurity Response Plan (FIRP).<\/p>\n
The FIRP, which government has developed with its humanitarian partners, aims at providing immediate life-saving and life-sustaining assistance to drought-affected people, among other objectives.<\/p>\n
The FIRP says during the 2015\/2016 growing season, Malawi experienced a prolonged severe dry spell in most parts of the country.<\/p>\n
The plan, which President Peter Mutharika launched last week at the Kamuzu Palace in Lilongwe, says 6.5 million people from 24 of the country\u2019s 28 districts will need food aid from July 2016 to March 2017.<\/p>\n
The FIRP says 2.4 million farmers completely lost their production and that 975,000 children and women are in need of nutrition assistance.<\/p>\n
The total budget for the FIRP is US$395.13 million, while confirmed pledges and resource gap currently are at US$91.32 million and US303.81 million respectively.<\/p>\n
Kadyamphungo thinks that had Malawians looked at other crops for food, the situation would not have been this desperate.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is time Malawians stopped considering maize as the only food crop,\u201d says Kadyamphungo, who is a vocalist for Zomba\u2019s Rising Sun Band. \u201cCrops like cassava can save us when we have poor rainfall.\u201d<\/p>\n
She says what prompted her to change her perception of cassava was that in 2014, she grew maize in the same garden and harvested less than 10 bags, each weighing 50 kg, instead of the usual 30 bags.<\/p>\n
During the 2015-2016 growing season, she again planted maize and got less than seven bags. It was then that she decided to split the piece of land so she could grow maize and cassava at the same time.<\/p>\n
Kadyamphungo says that to get started, she bought five types of improved cassava varieties from the Cassava adding Value for Africa (C:AVA) Project\u2019s seed multiplication component.<\/p>\n
\u201cI planted maize in one area of the garden, and in the other I grew cassava,\u201d she told Mana. \u201cDue to poor rainfall, the maize crop failed while the cassava crop survived and is promising.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Kadyamphungo later discovered, the improved cassava varieties are more resistant against local diseases, drought-tolerant and produce higher yields than traditional varieties.<\/p>\n
She says the garden, with its healthy-looking cassava leaves and stems, is the centre of attraction as people in the village are wondering how the crop has managed to survive on the dry patched land.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany farmers envy my cassava garden and are asking a lot of questions,\u201d says Kadyamphungo, adding that she has since decided to consider cassava as an important food and cash crop.<\/p>\n
C:AVA Project focuses on Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana, Malawi and Uganda, countries that produce 60 per cent of the cassava grown in Africa, according to a Commonwealth Scholarships Alumni newsletter.<\/p>\n
C:AVA aims to develop value chains for High Quality Cassava Flour (HQCF).<\/p>\n
An article in the newsletter says cassava can be a famine reserve, food and cash crop industrial raw material and feed for livestock.<\/p>\n
The article says cassava is a staple crop in the developing world and that in 2007, Africa produced 117.9 million tonnes of cassava, making it the most important root crop and a major source of dietary calories.<\/p>\n
The newsletter says C:AVA supports cassava farmers and processors in the production of the crop and processing activities through partnership with NGOs or other extension services.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom now onwards, I will be growing cassava can give you food and money. Let us grow the crop to improve our lives,\u201d says Kadyamphungo.<\/p>\n
The garden last October hosted a cassava demonstration day that brought together locals and officials from government and various organizations.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople were very impressed with what they saw,\u201d Kadyamphungo recalls. \u201cMany farmers in the village said they would also start growing cassava. I thank C:AVA and other stakeholders for assisting me.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the admirers of Kadyamphungo\u2019s cassava garden is none other than Village Headman Malensoma. He wants his village to emulate what the young farmer has done.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was young in the 1970s, but I remember cassava was an important crop then along with sweet potatoes and rice,\u201d says the 49-year-old Malensoma, born Anderson Mtengula.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur parents would mix cassava flour with that of maize to prepare nsima,\u201d he said. \u201cBut in most cases, cassava nsima was our main food.\u201d<\/p>\n
Malensoma warns against the folly of continuing to rely on maize as the country\u2019s staple crop when rainfall is unpredictable nowadays because of climate change.<\/p>\n
The cumulative effects of several years of multiple weather-related disasters have had a huge impact on Malawi, according to the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA).<\/p>\n
The disasters have cumulatively affected 25 million people since 1974, making Malawi one of the worst affected among developing countries.<\/p>\n
\u201cCassava is drought-tolerant. We can grow it for food, and also for seed multiplication to earn money. I am appealing to my subjects to grow the crop this year to ward off hunger,\u201d Malensoma says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government has repeatedly asked us to stop relying on maize. It is time we took heed of the advice and grew other food crops so that we don\u2019t find ourselves again in a situation we are in now.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the wake of the current food shortage the country is grappling with, President Mutharika has been in the forefront calling on Malawians to change their eating habits.<\/p>\n
Mutharika has again and again stressed the need for the country to value other food crops, instead of seeing maize as the only food crop.<\/p>\n
And Kadyamphungo agrees. She says the country will only be food-secure if Malawians stop thinking that their survival is solely dependent on maize nsima.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnless we stop seeing maize as the most important food crop, hunger will not go away. And with climate change wreaking havoc, we will always be begging for food outside,\u201d Kadyamphungo says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In yet another year of food shortage, Elizabeth Kadyamphungo\u2019s garden stands out and everyone in the village is talking about it. Hardly a day goes by without passers-by making envious comments about the one-and-a-half-hectare cassava garden in the village of Malensoma around Jokala, Traditional Authority Malemia in Zomba. As Malawi continues to reel from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28611","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\/28611","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=28611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28616,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28611\/revisions\/28616"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}