It’s good to be back in Malawi, this time travelling with Dr. Charles Howie, our wonderful volunteer Agriculture Consultant. We hit the ground running by heading straight out to our farm near Ekwendeni where we are working hard to establish year-round, high-quality vegetable production.
Water is the key to being able to grow crops all year in Malawi – right now it is around 28 degrees and there has been virtually no rainfall since May. For the first two hectares, we are using a borehole with a solar pump, but most of the water we need will come from rainwater harvesting. The rains will start in about 4 weeks so the race is on for us to finish constructing a large reservoir which will capture water in a deep gully and keep the crops on the farm irrigated throughout the 2024 dry season.
We arrived in Malawi on Wednesday and the next day the government devalued the currency by 44%. It’s hard to imagine what it is like to wake up to find that the small amount of cash you have in your pocket or bank account is now worth little more than half what it was the previous day. Fuel and electricity prices rose 45% today and some shops are closed while they adjust their prices. This affects Malawi Fruits too and everything we import – steel and polythene for greenhouses; solar pumps and drip kits for irrigation – now cost considerably more. This is a tough time for everyone in Malawi.
What it does mean is that we must re-double our efforts to empower farmers to get high yields and high quality crops to insulate themselves from the worst of the effects of this economic turbulence.
Malawi Fruits 