Malawi to begin irrigation farming to boost food: president

Malawi, until recently a net importer of food, is to start irrigation farming to help boost food production and end hunger, President Bingu wa Mutharika said on Tuesday.

The government will establish a green belt along its giant lake Malawi, which straddles one third of the country, Mutharika told reporters before departing for Norway to attend a conference on a green African revolution.

"Where there is a river, we will try to start irrigation. We should grow everything so that we have food all the time," he said in remarks quoted on state radio.

"God gave us water. We have a lot of rivers and lakes. We are going into irrigation farming in a big way."

Despite the huge fresh-water supply from Lake Malawi, Africa's third-largest, agricultural experts say only two percent of land is irrigated and most farming remains on a small scale and dependent on rain.

At the Norway conference, Mutharika said he would be seeking international investment to boost Malawi food production in order "to have food not only for ourselves, but the world.

"We don't eat much rice but we are going to produce a lot of rice to feed the rest of the world."

Mutharika said his poor nation will "no longer beg food, especially maize, from outside."

"For the past three years, Malawians agreed not to beg maize. We can beg other things, but not maize," Mutharika said in an apparent reference to the government's 50-million-dollar (35-million euro) programme of subsidised fertiliser which enabled peasant farmers to access cheap fertiliser.

Sixty percent of Malawi's 13 million citizens who live below the poverty line met their food needs for the first time in seven years in 2006 with a harvest of 2.2 million tonnes of maize.

Famine threatened up to five million people in 2005 following drought, and the Mutharika administration, just one year in office, spent more than 100 million dollars to import more than 400,000 tonnes of food to avert hunger.

Up to 85 percent of farming in Malawi is done by small-holder farmers who grow mainly maize, the country's staple.