Breaking with Tradition
Pineapples prove a novel source of income for this Malawian community
Tabiya Jafali is one of the members of the Chitontho Farmer Field School, which is increasing farmers’ income by growing pineapples. ©FAO/T. Munthali
The Nkhotakota district of Malawi is nestled between the sandy shores of Lake Malawi and the country’s largest wildlife reserve. Agriculture is one of the biggest industries and many communities live off the land. Farmers often grow rice, maize and cassava, the traditional crops of the area, as their parents and grandparents did before them. However, if you gaze out at the land surrounding Kakowa village, you’ll see something a little different: a sea of spiky, green pineapple crowns. So how did this community come to break with tradition and start farming the tasty, tropical fruit so many of us know and love?
In essence, the community was struggling to make an adequate income on the yields from traditional crops like rice and maize. Tabiya Jafali, a mother of three young children, recounts, “I had been farming rice for years and had very little return over the years. It was increasingly difficult to meet my children’s needs at home and to have enough money for school fees.”
A little while ago, however, Tabiya heard about the Farmer Field School (FFS) in her area. Thirty women and 12 men were enrolled in the group, which is supported by FAO and the Government of Malawi under the European Union-funded project, KULIMA short forKutukula Ulimi m’Malawi, which translates to “Promoting farming in Malawi”. The project aims to strengthen the farming knowledge of communities and empower them to transition from subsistence agriculture to a more productive and commercially-oriented agriculture.
Back in April 2019, members of FAO’s Chitontho FFS decided that they had to make a change in the way they farmed. They looked around for a viable farming enterprise that would allow them to boost their incomes and heard about a similar group of farmers who had tried something new: pineapple farming. Pineapples aren’t a common part of the diet in Nkhotakota, despite Malawi being a tropical country, but the FFS group learned that it was profitable. Being encouraged further by the government’s District Agriculture office, the Chitontho FFS group made a unanimous decision to grow pineapples.