Feature
Environment/Food security

By Frazer Potani, Lilongwe, Malawi

Ask any of Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika’s critics about his character.

You will be told that the first tenant residing at Malawi’s first plot (New State House) in Lilongwe is an arrogant man.

And recognizing that many Malawians are poor peasant farmers who cannot afford to spend $1 per day and his tiny poor southern African country depends on agriculture, Mutharika had for the benefit of the poor no choice but demonstrate positive arrogance against the World Bank policies .

He did it for a simple purpose: to save poor Malawian souls through his government, dating to 2005 enabling poor peasant farmers buy a 50 Kg fertilizer bag at a cheaper price through implementing the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) to enable them produce food in the field and bring it on the table.

The World Bank has been against subsidy policies in poor developing countries yet same policies have been in full practice in rich developed countries in the West enabling the already rich farmers becoming richer while poor peasant farmers in Third World nations not only poorer but struggling to bring food on the table.

In Malawi fertilizer is a very expensive commodity because it costs K3, 000 and above a single 50 Kg bag.

But since Mutharika has showed his arrogance against World Bank by, with donor support implementing the much touted FISP, poor farmers have been able to buy fertilizer at a lower price enabling Malawi enviously achieving food surplus.

Malawi and Mutharika have even been put on the international microscope due to this food security success story.

No wonder that Malawi Government has even dismissed that there are some people at risk of hunger in the country’s 13 million plus population.

“No one will go hungry in this country because we have enough food,” said Mutharika.

But since FISP’s introduction another truth is that some poor farmers have been unable to benefit from it due to some challenges crippling the initiative’s objective.

Yet such farmers have still survived by finding other means to boost soil fertility to produce food in their gardens!

One such survivor is 58-year-old Fayison Chindimba in Balaka, southern Malawi, over 200 Km from Lilongwe.

Balaka is one of the districts severely affected by climate impact in Malawi as in recent years has been experiencing droughts or floods during agricultural seasons affecting food production in the field in the process.

Since time immemorial, around this lean season in Malawi most rural households have no food and where it is found it is sold at prices beyond poor households’ purchasing power.

Chindimba, his wife Julita and their five children would have been around this time among the 201,000 people the USAID funded Famine Early Warning System-Network (FEWS-NET) reveals are currently in need of food aid in the southern region alone this year.

Following FEWS-NET revelations Malawi Government has started distributing food aid to them.

Chindimba and his family, has not for the past three years benefitted from FISP but still managed to produce food for consumption and sale in his garden.

“I was able to receive just the coupons for the subsidized agricultural inputs. But whenever I went to the markets in our area to purchase the fertilizer and the seed, the commodities were always out of stock. So to produce food in my garden I went to buy maize unsubsidized seed elsewhere using money and turned to fertilizer tree leaves,” he said.

Chindimba is just one of the close to 150,000 smallholder farmers struggling with climate change and have weak financial muscles to buy fertilizer who have but according to the World Agro forestry Centre (WAC) turned to using fertilizer tree systems to bring food on their tables.

Several species of tree are used, though the most popular is Gliricidia sepium

The farmers intercrop fertilizer trees with maize to provide moisture-preserving shade for the growing crops.

Other farmers use the technique of burring fertilizer-tree leaves in the ground to make the soil more fertile and help retain moisture at planting time and a study has revealed that fertilizer tree systems have the potential of doubling yields of maize which is also Malawi’s staple food.

Chindimba and other farmers from his area decided to turn to fertilizer trees and leaves to bring food on the table after learning the technique from an agricultural field officer on climate change adaptation programme from the British charitable organization, Oxfam.


“These trees enrich the soils apart from helping keep moisture in the garden even if the rains rarely come,” he said.


Chindimba digs planting holes in his garden between April and June annually and buries fresh or dry leaves in them from Gliricidia sepium trees that grow close to his house.

The fast-growing trees (native to Mexico and Central America), grows well in a large range of conditions.

“When the rains come around September and October I open part of each hole and plant my seeds. The leaves decompose in the ground, and the resulting compost boosts the soil’s fertility and traps moisture around the maize plants like a sponge, enabling the crop to grow more vigorously,” said Chindimba.

In Mzimba, northern Malawi, 38-year-old widow, Modesta Ngulube used to with her six children struggle to just get a single meal per day.

“I am now able to produce food in my garden using fertilizer trees,” said Ngulube.

She uses Tephrosia vogelii trees, which she plants in rows 1.5 metres (about five feet) apart.

“Using fertilizer trees has even seen my maize yields increase since I began planting them. Previously, I would get less than 10 bags of maize from my fields,” explained Ngulube adding, “Now I get about 30.”

Fertilizer trees have made a big difference to the Mzimba widow and her children as she had explained.

“Now we have food throughout the year. In the past, we often went hungry,” said Ngulube.

She even boasted that she is able to sell some of the maize to solicit money for her needs and of her children who are now able to go to school.


Meanwhile, before turning to fertilizer trees for food production Chindimba used chemical fertilizers and would harvest 40 bags of maize, weighing 50 kg each.

However, since switching to tree fertilizers his crop has declined slightly to 36 bags pointing to the fact that the trees have the magic to bring food on the table.

“But I am far better off as of now since I am saving over K 48,000 [about $300] which I used to spend on chemical fertilizers,” he explained.

Sebastius Mbewe a forestry officer from Blantyre District Forestry Office said if fully promoted fertilizer trees have the potential to eradicate hunger and poverty as well as protect the environment

“With joint support from Malawi Government and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) planting and promotion of fertilizer trees in villages in Kuntaja and Kapeni areas in Blantyre has improved poor households’ livelihoods,” said Mbewe.

He added that maize crops growing alongside fertilizer trees are more likely to give a farmer a better yield as they don’t wither easily because of (lack of) moisture.

“The trees, which increase fertilizing nitrogen in the soil, don’t grow taller than the maize crop. So they don’t stifle the growth of the maize. The leaves falling from the trees on the other hand cover the ground,” said Mbewe adding, “When it rains, this layer traps the raindrops, preventing them from accumulating into runoff. They also aid percolation into the soil.”

He further explained that when it is sunny, the tree canopies shade the ground and the fallen leaves help keep the moisture in the soil.

“In areas of Traditional Authorities Kapeni and Kuntaja fertilizer trees have transformed households into food secure homes since they started using the practice of burying leaves from these trees,” said Mbewe.

He disclosed that the two areas were also conserving the environment using the same fertilizer trees.

“The two areas are just some of the places where rampant environmental degradation activities such as deforestation for charcoal and shifting cultivation took place,” said Mbewe.

He further said that communities in Kapeni and Kuntaja are apart from fertilizer tree planting also practicing soil conservation activities.

To help many Malawian poor peasant farmers who are struggling to accumulate financial power to purchase fertilizer for producing food in the fields the Agro forestry Food Security Programme, with funding by Irish Aid and coordinated by the World Agro forestry Centre (ICRAF), in partnership with a consortium of national institutions including Malawi Government, started implementing the fertilizer tree programme in the country.

The programme aims at enabling at least 200,000 families or around 1.3 million of the poorest people in Malawi to increase their food production in the field and enhance their nutrition, eradicate poverty as well as conserve soil and heal the environment through planting trees.

The programme at the same time will do much to improve soil fertility and restore degraded farmland.

All of this will be done by encouraging farmers to use the agro forestry technologies developed by WAC partners over more than a decade of research in Southern Africa region.

According to WAC in recent years, thousands of farming families have dramatically increased their welfare, and that of their land, by planting trees which capture atmospheric nitrogen, and by incorporating into their small farms a range of trees which yield fruit, firewood and livestock fodder in the region.

The benefits of these agro forestry technologies are clear; the task now is to promote their use throughout Malawi.

Malawi's Director of Extension, Grace Malindi, also Officer-In-Charge for 2,800 extension workers across the country, visited Zambia and was extremely excited by what fertilizer trees have done in food production in agriculture in that neighbouring country.

She therefore, said with resources available Malawi Government would implement the fertilizer tree initiative across the country to reach out more farmers.

"If funding is available, there is potential to reach the entire farming population of the country by 2012; a total of 2.7 million farm households," said Malindi.

Jeffrey Sachs (doubling as Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in the US and Director of the UN Millennium Project) on his part said the global village has an unprecedented opportunity to improve the lives of billions of people by adopting practical approaches to meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and singled out the strategies of using fertilizer trees in agricultural food production as one of them.

“Fertilizer trees are among the most promising means for achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving global hunger by 2015,” said Sachs adding that since the fertilizer trees have the potential to reduce hunger, they can also contribute to poverty reduction by 2015 since the two crises are closely linked.

WAC scientists are already patting themselves on the back claiming they have managed to triple maize yields on smallholder farms in Zambia and Malawi by simple "evergreen agriculture" techniques.

They say that planting fertilizer trees such as acacia among the crops automatically fertilized the fields.

The experts of late call for a scaling-up of the use of so-called "fertilizer trees" in fields throughout Africa where women make majority farmers to fight climate change and increase food security.

They give an example of a unique acacia known as a "fertilizer tree" saying it has typically led to "a doubling or tripling of maize yields in smallholder agriculture in Zambia and Malawi and the evidence was presented at a conference in the Hague.

The findings were even central to the arguments of agro forestry experts at the conference, who urged decision-makers to spread this technology more widely throughout the African countries most vulnerable to climate change and food shortages, and to think differently about more practical ways to solve the problems that are most pressing to smallholder farmers.

WAC Director General Dennis Garrity, said that evergreen agriculture - or the integration of fertilizer trees into crop and livestock-holding farms - "is rapidly emerging as an affordable and accessible solution to improving production on Africa's farms."

"Doubling food production by mid-century, particularly in Africa, will require non-conventional approaches, particularly since so many of the continent's soils are depleted, and farmers are faced with a changing climate," he said adding,
"We need to reinvent agriculture in a sustainable and affordable way, so that it can reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases and be adapted to climate change."

Emphasizing his call, in an article in the scientific magazine, 'Food Security', Garrity and co-authors highlighted how evergreen agriculture has already provided benefits to several million farmers in Zambia, Malawi, Niger and Burkina Faso.

Fertilizer trees draw nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil through their roots and leaf litter, replenishing exhausted soils with rich sources of organic nutrients.
The trees also bolster nutrient supply, increase food crop yields, and enhance the production of fodder, fuel and timber, according to the article.


These systems also were said to provide additional income to farmers from tree products, while at the same time storing much greater amounts of carbon than other agricultural systems.

For example, farmers in Malawi had increased their maize yields by up to 280 percent when the crop is grown under a canopy of one particular fertilizing tree, Faidherbia albida.

Unlike most other trees, Faidherbia sheds its leaves during the early rainy season and remains dormant during the crop-growing period.

This makes it highly compatible with food crops because it does not compete with them for water, nutrients, or light - only the bare branches of the tree's canopy spread overhead while crops of maize, sorghum, or millets grow to maturity below.

The leaves and pods were also found to "provide a crucial source of fodder in the dry season for livestock when nearly all other plants have dried up." The trees may continue to provide these cost-free benefits for up to 70 or 100 years.

In Niger, there are now more than 4.8 million hectares of millet and sorghum being grown in agro forests that have up to 160 Faidherbia trees on each hectare.

A broad alliance is now emerging of African governments, research institutions, and international and local development partners committed to expanding evergreen agriculture and agro forestry.

"We are already working with 18 countries across the African continent to develop national plans for the accelerated implementation of evergreen agriculture," said Garrity.

The next step is to further refine and adapt the technologies to a wider range of smallholder farming systems in diverse agricultural environments, so that millions more farmers can benefit now and for generations to come from such sustainable solutions to their food production challenges.


A new study in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability also says fertilizer trees—which fix nitrogen in the soil—have improved crops yields in five African countries.

In some cases yields have doubled with the simple addition of nitrogen-soaking trees.

The research discovered that fertilizer trees could play a role in alleviating hunger on the continent while improving environmental conditions.

"In only five African countries, there are now some 400,000 smallholder farmers using fertilizer trees to provide critically needed soil nutrients—and many report major increases in maize yields—which shows that it is possible to rapidly introduce innovations in Africa that can have an immediate impact on food security," said Oluyede Ajayi, lead author of the paper with WAC explaining further that when farmers plant fertilizer trees water efficiency even improves.

"Farmers are getting higher yields from the same amount of rainwater. And the trees are helping reduce the run-off and soil erosion that is a key factor behind food production shortfalls in Africa," said the expert.

Ajayi also disclosed that farmers employing fertilizer trees also saw significant income boosts (boosting incomes between 79 and 251 percent per hectare).

The research looked at the use of fertilizer trees in Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Fertilizer trees are an ideal sustainable asset for boosting food production in the fields in Africa than chemical fertilizers not just because most poor peasant farmers on the continent struggle to buy chemical fertilizers to apply them in the field to produce food or fertilizer subsidies like the one currently running in Malawi risk flopping due to withdrawal of donor support no!

But because chemical fertilizers application in the field according to a study by Peter Motavalli and his team from the Department of Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia in the United States despite rapidly increasing agricultural food production are threatenibg sustainability of natural resources namely water, air and soil that all living things including humanbeings can not live without them on the planet.

“Despite the overall benefits use of reactive Nitrogen [fertilizer], major environmental problems for example soil and water acidification, contamination of surface and groundwater resources, increased ozone depletion and greenhouse gas levels, and loss of biodiversity have developed due to the presence of excessive environmental Nitrogen,” he said.

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