Malawi’s Integrated Production System under attack

Malawi’s Agricultural Parliamentary Committee is investigating complaints by tobacco farmers who are unhappy with an Integrated Production System (IPS) that they say the government has imposed on them, according to a story by the Nyasa Times.

And farmers aren’t the only ones who have reservations about the system. A paper on Tobacco Production and Market Review Policies by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development, presented at the 2014 Tobacco Industry Annual Seminar, confirmed that the IPS had a number of problems.

The paper reportedly pointed out that the system lacked ‘transparency in loan portfolios’. For example, the tobacco buying companies were said to be free to charge farmers any level of interest on the value of farm inputs.

A farmer in Dowa was said to have told the Times that farmers were charged K30,000 for each bag of fertilizer that cost K16,000 on the open market.

One MP who is serving on the committee looking into the complaints, Nkhosa Kamwendo, said the system was just there “to steal from the farmers…”

Kamwendo said his job as an MP was to protect the people in his constituency who made their living from farming; so if those people were being ripped off he was failing in his duty.