Cassava promising much for Malawi

Long regarded as an organic nutrition light weight and cashless root, Malawi’s cassava is getting attention and may in a not-too-distant future heavily spread its relevance beyond traditional food industries.

For Malawian communities – mostly along Lake Malawi – that produce cassava as a mainstay staple, reinventing cassava to deliver more to their income besides nutrition has for decades been top of agenda without much heralded success. 

Lately, Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture, reeling from the decreasing clout of global tobacco markets, has been embracing cassava and other root and tuber crops as viable alternatives in offering income and employment opportunities for smallholder farmers, focusing on women and the youths, if value addition is carefully adopted.

“My family has for decades been traditionally producing maize and cassava as staple food and tobacco for commercial. Over the past few years, tobacco has been steeply losing its potential as a cash crop. We had to adapt and what we did is invest more effort in the other two alternatives. Maize always had an obvious little potential return given our land size. What was more logical to do was to mass increase production of cassava and instead trade in Cassava value added products because of the rapidly emerging industry,” says Masauko Zuwawo, a farmer and small and medium enterprise entrepreneur, who runs a small cassava processing factory that produces cassava flour and energy briquettes in the outskirts of Lilongwe.  

Zuwawo, like over 200 other Malawian establishments and/or individual members, are organized  under the National Cassava Processors Association (NCPA), an umbrella association and interest group of local cassava value adding processors. NCPA aims at breaking barriers and making the grade in the mercantilism of mass producing and trading in high quality and certified cassava-based industrial and energy products locally and internationally.

NCPA members are members of the Root and Tuber Crops Development Trust RTCDT, a platform for root and tuber crops-Cassava, Potato and sweet potato- value chain coordinating with the Malawian Ministry of Agriculture and selected stakeholders mostly through Irish Aid support on programs that aim at increasing income and employment opportunities for rural populations through Cassava and other root crops. The programs target smallholder farmers, small or medium sized enterprises (MSMEs) to do better in the face of challenges like small landholdings, poor access to inputs, services and markets. 

The project seeks to narrow barriers to market integration and enhances opportunities for MSMEs to engage in value addition, be it through increasing productivity, processing of raw products or reaching better markets.

Today, Mr. Zuwawo proudly owns Cassava processed products Zuwawo Starch Factory where he produces, packages and distributes his own branded cassava starch, Kondowole and High Quality Cassava Flour (HQCF), which is mostly used as a stabilizer in the food industry in Malawi. 

 “I solely live on my small factory now and am not going back to tobacco farming. At least for the foreseeable future,” says a Mr. Zuwawo whose annual income from the factory has been increasing yearly over the last five years.

Laster Kasiyamaliro of Nkhotakota District is another MSMEs in the program. His small diesel-powered factory takes advantage of the tonnes of Cassava produced in his district and neighboring Nkhatabay and Mzimba districts to process industrial HQCF. Kasiyamaliro has a stable market and bosses the HQCF market along Lake Malawi from central up to north west dominating the Cassava bread industry in the area and domestics supplied by his factory.

“The market is stable and I can only grow as more industries and domestics are requiring processed cassava products now,” he says.

Kasiyamaliro’s factory has even just installed a solar drying facility to enable him to process HQCF throughout the year regardless of the season in higher quantities and better quality through a contributory loan he has self-financed for his part of the investment from the successful HQCF business.

Both Kasiyamaliro and Zuwawo acknowledge that the main challenges with the cassava value addition is a lack of cassava during off season and a lack of drying equipment during the rainy season when sun-drying is the only option for some processors. As a result, Kasiyamaliro decided to invest in a solar-drier and mass produce during the period fresh cassava is in season. 

He quickly acknowledges the machinery requires substantial investment, often out of reach for MSMEs and if government and stakeholders are really serious on developing the sector, they should enable Cassava processors access machinery to produce value added Cassava at mass scale.

“Whatever the scenario, the market for value added cassava products is growing especially now that we are using Cassava from improved varieties in Malawi,” says Kasiyamaliro.

They both agree that cassava has changed their lives and think there is more assurance in it than other crops-for them and Malawi. 

They think government should play its part further in reducing taxation on machinery for processing equipment for root and tuber crops MSMEs, if the industry should grow the profitable value addition further.

If that happens, maybe cassava will finally deliver on its promise to deliver on Malawi’s economy and being more than just a snack.