Malawi reopens agriculture schools to foster food security

As part of his war against hunger in the country, Malawi President Bingu was Mutharika on Monday announced that he would reopen several educational institutions that once taught modern agriculture methods but were shut down by his predecessor Bakili Muluzi due to financial constraints between 1994 and 2004.

Mutharika, who has won praise from both local and international observers for his achievement of food security since he took power in 2004, said he would reopen the farm schools to consolidate a strong base for sustainable agriculture as a basis for the country’s development.

Malawi has been producing a bumper harvest of its staple food crop maize in the past three years, mainly by Mutharika’s subsidising smallholder farmers with fertilisers and seeds.

As a result, some 400,000 metric tonnes of surplus maize was exported to Zimbabwe in 2007, while 10,000 metric tonnes was equally divided as a donation to Lesotho and Swaziland as Malawi’s humanitarian gesture to the two drought-hit states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), formed in 1980 to economically empower the region.