Pigeon pea marketing woes deepen for Malawi’s smallholder farmers
Malawi is one of the foremost producers of pigeon peas in Africa. According to the Malawi Investment and Trade Center, the country currently accounts for about 6% of the total continental production.
While smallholder farmers dominate Malawi’s production, they have limited access to market information, stable markets, or technology to increase their productivity. They frequently experience exploitation by vendors, who take advantage of farmers’ marginalization to buy the commodities at very low prices.
These challenges are further exacerbated by the lack of enforcement of minimum farm gate prices set by the agriculture ministry. Moreover, most farmers are not even aware that the ministry releases farm gate prices for essential farm commodities, which would protect them from unscrupulous buyers.
This year, the farm gate price for pigeon peas was pegged at MK240 (about US$0.32) per kilogram, which the head of the Farmers Union of Malawi, Frightone Njolomole, described as “very promising.” By contrast, farmers were recently selling their crop for as little as MK30 (about US$0.040) per kilogram in some parts of the country. This has led to outcry by farmers asking for better prices.
The Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation of Malawi (ADMARC) is mandated to buy crops from farmers, which would help ensure fairer prices. But it has limited capacity to cover the entire country.
Disruption of Markets
The disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have also hit the sector hard, as a proportion of Malawi’s pigeon pea production is exported, especially to India. With India also heavily hit by the pandemic, there is little hope that farmers in Malawi will make big fortunes out of this year’s pigeon peas production.
Musa Yasin, expresses concern about finding a market for his pigeon pea crop amid local Covid-19 control measures,“I am just about start harvesting, but I’m not sure if ADMARC or the local middlemen traders who buy from us to export to other countries will come forth,” he says.
The June/July report on the minimum expenditure basket in Malawi confirms that prices for pigeon peas have drastically decreased as its marketing season starts.
“Without government interventions, it is highly likely that farmers will face even greater exploitation from middlemen, as they take advantage of the closure of international markets. According to Njolomole, the Farmer’s Union is currently holding talks with the government in a bid to to assist farmers to achieve, at a minimum, the farm gate prices set for the local market.
With the country’s heavy reliance on exports to India, however, some have questioned the future for the country’s pigeon peas production, calling for more political will to help farmers grow and do better.
One under-exploited opportunity is to encourage domestic consumption of pigeon peas, by raising more awareness of the benefits. Most farmers already grow pigeon peas for subsistence. With the reduced purchasing power for urban households caused by the pandemic, pigeon peas can provide a cheap source of proteins, dietary fiber, iron, and vitamins.
There is also need for more targeted support to enable farmers to venture into value addition. One strategy for this is to share success stories from enterprising pigeon pea farmers to highlight alternative avenues for earning a livelihood, instead of depending on government institutions to facilitate market access.
Written by Nellie Kanyemba Kapatuka
This article is part of Covid-19 Food/Future, an initiative under TMG ThinkTank for Sustainability’s SEWOH Lab project (https://www.tmg-thinktank.com/sewoh-lab). It aims at providing a unique and direct insight into the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on national and local food systems. Also follow @CovidFoodFuture, our Video Diaries From Nairobi, and @TMG_think on Twitter. Funding for this initiative is provided by BMZ, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
