What next to build a sustainable future for farmers and workers in Malawi? Vidya Rangan, Senior Research and Impact Manager, Fairtrade Foundation poses the question as today, we share our new report – Branching out: Fairtrade in Malawi – the second in a series that aims to understand and analyse how Fairtrade is making a difference in Malawi.
Small farmers in Malawi contribute close to 60% of the country’s agricultural GDP but face considerable challenges. Most lack the necessary resources, technical knowledge and capacity to improve their production and consequently sales that can bring in more incomes. This, coupled with unreliable access to markets, puts at risk their household food security, their children’s education and their access to basic healthcare and social services. Despite the Malawian government’s laudable efforts to fight hunger, it is clear that farmers need continued support and strong partnerships to help sustain liveihoods and the country’s agrarian economy.
Fairtrade aims to address some of these challenges by opening avenues to markets for what small farmers grow, building direct farmer-consumer links and strengthening their capacity to become stronger, more efficient business organisations. Our work in Malawi began in 1998. Today, Fairtrade works with nine organisations across the country and impacts over 20,000 farmers and workers who make their living growing tea, coffee, groundnuts, honey and cane sugar. Fairtrade has also worked hard to ensure that these products have a market and today over hundreds of companies in the UK alone source Fairtrade products from Malawi.
As a system committed to continual improvement, we need to understand what impact Fairtrade is having on farmers and workers and how, so that our work can focus on sustaining and deepening this impact. Today, we share our report – Branching out: Fairtrade in Malawi – the second in a series that aims to understand and analyse how Fairtrade is making a difference in Malawi. It builds on the report from the first phase Taking Root: Fairtrade in Malawi that was published in 2011 and studied five Fairtrade-certified organisations – three in tea and one each in the sugar and groundnuts sectors. This second phase report, published by the Fairtrade Foundation in collaboration with our regional partners (Fairtrade Africa and the Malawi Fairtrade Network) and the Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, builds on the first and focused on select indicators to monitor and assess the changes over the last few years.
The study provides further evidence that Fairtrade is clearly contributing to the demonstrable growth and progress that all five organisations are making. Although still a long way to go, Fairtrade has enabled farmers’ standard of living to improve. A high proportion of certified farmers are now able to pay school fees for their children, ensure there is enough food to eat through the year, increase their assets and experience more stability in incomes. Farmers greatly value the investment of the Fairtrade Premium in agricultural inputs such as access to seed and fertiliser, social infrastructure projects like schools, healthcare facilities and drinking water facilities and improving the administrative capacity of their organisations by recruiting staff. Most significantly, the study notes that democracy is alive and well-established in all five organisations with good communication and trust between farmers and leaders and clear development goals in place for each.
Despite this growth, it is clear that for farmers to sustain their livelihoods over the long-term, they have to be able to gain more from supply chains that they currently source to i.e. gain more value from the products they produce. One of the main themes emerging across all five organisations from this study is the clear ambition that farmers have themselves expressed to move up the value chain and gain more autonomy from their ‘patron organisations’. All five organisations we studied, expressed a desire to be independent of their immediate purchasers and build their capacity to more gain more value, profits and income from the products they grow. It is critical for Fairtrade and other partners working in these sectors to understand this aspiration better and help farmers achieve it in a manner that optimises return and impact for them.
An encouraging development in the case of groundnuts has been the setting up of the Afri-Nut processing facility in Malawi that is part-owned by the farmers. The facility presents many opportunities – both in helping Malawian Fairtrade groundnuts receive more value at origin (by exporting processed products rather than shelled nuts) and also in training and helping farmers move up the value chain gradually. Farmers see clear potential and opportunity with this development and it will be important to monitor what economic impact this has.
It is clear that such partnerships that help farmers gain more for what they grow are a fundamental route to agricultural and economic sustainability. While Fairtrade has clearly contributed to the establishment and growth of farmer organisations in the country, our focus now needs to be on deepening the partnerships that can support these organisations achieve these ambitions in their journey towards a sustainable future.
