One of the country’s players in the manufacturing sector, Illovo Sugar Malawi, has indicated that it plans to leverage on the Shire Valley Transformation Project (SVTP) to roll out massive cotton production together with interested farmers in the Shire valley.
This follows revelations that the company has put some 30 hectares of land to cotton production this year on what it calls trial basis.
In an interview, on the sidelines of an investor forum in Blantyre, Illovo Managing Director, Lekani Katandula said this is part of diversifying revenue streams.
“We do want to diversify our revenue sources and we have said a number of times that we would like to invest into power generation, diversification of our value chain beyond sugar and cotton production is one area that we are trialing. We know that the Shire valley was a big cotton growing area and with the Shire valley Transformation project, there will be a lot more access to irrigable land and we believe that quite a bit of that land could go under cotton with many traders from the valley and we can be some of the people that will be growing cotton and resuscitate some of the existing cotton ginneries and give Malawi another avenue of generating forex and help deal with foreign exchange shortages.
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“We haven’t started doing it on a commercial basis, we are only running a small trial of 30 hectares and it depends with the SVTP how much we can motivate more growers to grow cotton. It is not going to be all land owned by Illovo. We will put some of our existing land to cotton as we improve on our yields per hectare,” Katandula said.
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He added: “We will not be taking out sugarcane quickly because we need to improve our total sugar make but we are improving our investment in improved irrigation and drainage systems to produce more sugarcane on a small piece of land than the current land and our sugarcane and leverage on our growers to grow more cotton so that together we can then have more supply to run one ginnery so it all depends on how many farmers will respond to this and therefore determine how much could go into that value chain.”
Commenting on the state of the cotton sector in Malawi agriculturalist Leonard Chimwaza said in Malawi, the cotton sector is facing a number of challenges witnessed by low production of above 50 percent of the 100,000 metric tonnes produced in 2011.
He said this is damaging both companies’ investment and farmers’ incomes and threatening the sector’s future.
“It is also not good in the quest to move Malawi to a middle-income country. There are many reasons why overall production is at a historical low, including low yields due to erratic rainfall, high prices of seeds, untimely availability of seed, poor agriculture extension services, low world cotton price and poor-quality inputs given to farmers.
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“If Illovo intends to join the band wagon, then they have come at the right time. We need more investors in the cotton sector. The proposal is to have close to 45,000 ha subjected to cotton production. For this to materialize we need both govt and private investment in the cotton sector. We need to produce more seed cotton if we are to meet the ginning demand of over 400,000mt per annum,” Chimwaza said.
