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In Pictures: Malawi’s tobacco industry

With plummeting prices and a collapsing market, much of the industry is going up in smoke.

Ireen Kameta plucks the mature leaves at her tobacco field. It is estimated that more than 80 percent of Malawians are directly or indirectly employed by the tobacco industry.
By Eldson Chagara
Published On 10 Feb 2014

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Blantyre, Malawi – This country has traditionally depended heavily on tobacco production and sales to support its economy. But its reliance on the cash crop has contributed to Malawi’s vulnerable economic position on the global level.

However, with poor market prices, the anti-smoking lobby gaining new prominence and poor economic governance, farmers are now turning to more profitable crops.

According to the International Tobacco Growers Association, transnational tobacco manufacturing and tobacco leaf companies have been collaborating in numerous efforts to oppose global tobacco control. One of their strategies is to stress the economic importance of tobacco to the developing countries that grow it.

Malawi is an extreme example, but not a unique case, of how transnational tobacco companies have used developing countries’ economic dependence to oppose global tobacco regulations. While there is a push for Malawi to diversify crops for economic stability, for now, tobacco will remain the country’s main foreign exchange earner. 

Malawi has been the leader in tobacco production in southern Africa dating back to the 1890s, and the industry is still the cornerstone of the country(***)s economy.
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Many farmers are leaving tobacco cultivation and venturing into other crops due to the poor price being offered on the market. The devaluation of the Malawi currency has hit farmers here hard.
While the income from production was once concentrated among a few estate owners, it is now spread across some 350,000 households, with powerful multiplier effects in rural areas.
Ireen Kameta lives in a grass thatched house after ten years as a tobacco farmer, and struggles to feed her family after tobacco prices plummeted.
In Malawi, seven out of 10 workers are either directly or indirectly employed by the sector and tobacco represents up to 53 percent of the country(***)s exports.
Falesi Laudoni sells vegetables in the upmarket town of Zingwangwa in Blantyre city. She had been a tobacco farmer for more than ten years, but decided to quit in order to make more money. She now makes three dollars a day in a country where an average resident lives on a dollar per day.
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Chipiliro Phiri, 22, is a welder at a garage in Ndirande township in Blantyre. A former tobacco farmer, he moved to the city after failing to raise enough money from the harvest last year.
Former tobacco farmer Magaret Luka arranges her fresh tomatoes on her bench at a local market in Malawi(***)s commercial capital. She has sold tomatoes for five years and makes more than she could if she was still growing tobacco.
Once a tabacco farmer, 23-year-old Maliko Binali now makes a living in a furniture workshop in the populous township of Ndirande. He says tobacco farming is too involving and demands a lot of energy and hard work for a very low income.