The Tobacco Control Commission (TCC) has said it has intensified efforts to bring sanity in the tobacco industry to ensure that farmers and the economy as a whole continue to realise more benefits from the leaf.<\/p>\n
This comes ahead of the opening of the 2018 tobacco marketing season, tentatively scheduled for April 2018.<\/p>\n
TCC Chief Executive Officer, Kaisi Sadala, said rebuilding the sector\u2019s structures now would help create resilience for the crop and market efficiency.<\/p>\n
Tobacco remains Malawi\u2019s major foreign exchange earner followed by tea and sugar, but it has continued to lose its momentum over the years, mainly due to the global anti-smoking campaign.<\/p>\n
This has led to a drop in international market demand for the leaf.<\/p>\n
Sadala, however, said not all is lost for the leaf, hence a need to create an enabling environment for structured production and market.<\/p>\n
Among other things, he said, going forward, the regulator would ensure enforcement of laws that prohibit the sale of tobacco from uncertified seed and also curb parallel markets.<\/p>\n
The Tobacco Act prohibits anyone from buying tobacco without a valid buying licence and in places that are not licensed.<\/p>\n
He said in line with the provisions of the law, the commission shall, by order of the court, destroy and forfeit such tobacco.<\/p>\n
He called on tobacco farmers not to sell their tobacco to intermediate buyers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere will be no market for non-registered traders at the floors. We are sending a signal to the market that these things cannot be tolerated any further,\u201d Sadala said.<\/p>\n
The TCC chief expressed worry over the tendency by some growers to include non-tobacco-related materials in their bales, saying the development erodes the confidence that buyers have in Malawi tobacco.<\/p>\n
Sadala said TCC shall enforce stringent measures to completely eradicate non-tobacco-related materials and nesting from tobacco in order to maintain the high-quality standards of Malawi\u2019s tobacco at global level.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, TCC has also since deployed measures to review charges and levies farmers pay through the tobacco supply chain to protect the grower.<\/p>\n
According to first-round crop assessment figures, Malawi\u2019s tobacco production is estimated at about 149 million kgs this year, almost 12.8 percent less of the international market demand.<\/p>\n
For the 2018 marketing season, buyers need 171 million kgs of all kinds of tobacco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Tobacco Control Commission (TCC) has said it has intensified efforts to bring sanity in the tobacco industry to ensure that farmers and the economy as a whole continue to realise more benefits from the leaf. This comes ahead of the opening of the 2018 tobacco marketing season, tentatively scheduled for April 2018. TCC Chief […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61894","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\/61894","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=61894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61897,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61894\/revisions\/61897"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}