Lilongwe ‒ Shombe Banda from Kasungu District in Central Malawi was a tobacco farmer for 35 years. He recently switched to growing other crops, such as soya beans, groundnuts and maize. His motivation to change was mostly economic, he says. 

“With tobacco, I was losing,” says Banda. “It requires a lot of inputs like fertilizer, which is very expensive now and tobacco is too labour intensive.”

“Now I use the soya beans and groundnut residues to develop composite manure. I apply the manure in my maize field and for this reason, I use less fertilizer and keep expenditure down. The crops that I grow now are easy to manage and sell as there are locally available markets everywhere. For maize I sell some and keep the rest as food for my family. We are a happy and self-reliant family,” he says. 

In late 2023, Malawi took a significant step forward in its tobacco control measures by ratifying World Health Organization (WHO)’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), a crucial international treaty designed to address the severe public health risks associated with tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke. 

A key aspect of implementation of the FCTC is to work with tobacco farmers on crop replacement and diversification which also has long-term economic, agricultural and health benefits. In Malawi, implementation is in its infancy and so farmers like Banda, and Bazilio Luuwanga, another farmer from Kasungu District, are demonstrating the power of these benefits. 

Luuwanga explains that the difficulties with tobacco farming extend far beyond the field. Tobacco farmers must arrange transport for themselves and their baled crops to the tobacco auction floors where they are sold. The floors are located very far from home. When the tobacco is sold, farmers must then travel far to banks in district headquarters or cities to access their payments. 

“When I was growing tobacco and I used to travel to the tobacco auction floors, sometimes the other farmers and I had no money to buy food,” he says. “We could spend nights in unsafe accommodation, putting our lives at risk. In all this I used to think about my wife and children at home only to come back with less returns due to controlled prices and so many unexplained deductions.” 

Now that Luuwanga farms food crops such as maize, he has more control. “The big difference now is that I am in direct contact with buyers, some even come here right to my farm. This way, I am now able to negotiate the selling price with the buyer right here at home,” he says. 

WHO estimates that tobacco farmers may absorb nicotine equivalent to smoking 50 cigarettes a day and Luuwanga bears testament to this reality. “During harvesting, leaf type quality grading and when packing into bales, I used to suffer a lot of chest pains and persistent coughing’” he says. “This was very bad as I had to seek medical attention all the time.”

Luuwanga says that the transition has improved his family’s quality of life. This season, he was able to pay his daughter’s school fees. “I am a happy person now. I stay with my family. We plan, grow crops, harvest together, sell some and keep some for food. We are together in everything. Together we see prosperity in the future,” he says.