Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Making money out of food processing

When he thinks of money from his Irish potato garden, one Anganile Kalonda (not real name) visualizes himself standing between huge sacks of the produce along the Blantyre-Lilongwe road at Lizulu in Ntcheu.

Here – he convinces himself – he can sell a small basin full of the potatoes at a set price and fatten his pockets before going back home to enjoy with his wife and children.

Unfortunately, Kalonda would not get a lot of money from this.

Sweet potatoes are seasonal; as such those who plant the crop harvest it at the same time. And, if they all decide to sell it, they do so at the same time. Therefore, Kalonda has to set attractive prices for him to escape the burden of transporting the gigantic bags back home and failing to store them.

To Kalonda, an attractive price is that which buyers – mostly passengers on buses commuting along the road – opt for: the cheapest.

A situation like Kalonda’s is one that confronts a lot of individuals across the country. After sweating to yield a crop, most of them hardly enjoy the fruit of this sweat because most of the prices are ones that would help clear the stock.

Consequently, lip smacking bananas from Thekerani in Thyolo and Nkondezi in Nkhata Bay; rice from Bwanje Valley and Karonga; Irish potatoes from Khosolo in Mzimba and Tsangano and Lizulu in Ntcheu and groundnuts, maize, cassava and various leaf and fruit vegetables grown across the country will sell cheaply.

However, the situation could have been different if there were food processing.

“When you process your food crops, you increase the shelf life for such crops,” says Kamia Kaluma Sulumba, One Village One Product (OVOP) National Coordinator.

“As such, you sell your products not because you are afraid that the produce would get damaged and that you would find problems storing it, but because you are impressed with the prices offered at the market. Hence, you gain more.”

She says lessons should be drawn from basic things such as maize flour and the harvested maize itself. While harvested maize will need a lot of attention to for it not to go bad or rot, she says, one can store flour for a long time without much attention.

Many might only agree with Sulumba on the issue of flour and not on fresh foods like Irish potatoes. But after listening to the story carved by the Bvumbwe Vegetable Growers Association and that of the Ngolowindo Horticultural Cooperative Society, very few would disagree with the fact that food processing helps one spoon lots of money.

“When we used to sell fresh vegetables, we hardly got enough profits,” says Clement Banda, Secretary for the Bvumbwe Vegetable Growers Association.

“For instance, we sold a one-metre bag of fresh vegetables at between K200 and K300. But when we process by drying that same one-metre bag, we realize from it 175 packets.

“We sell each packet at K150 which means that we realize up to K26,250 on a bag that used to give us only about K300 when sold unprocessed.”

He says the association also spoons more money when it sells processed tomatoes than fresh ones.

He says when sold fresh, a kilogramme of tomatoes fetches them around K120 while the same kilogramme of tomatoes processed into sauce fetches not less than K350.

“These differences are also experienced when we sell pawpaws and granadillas in fresh and processed forms,” says Banda.

He says unlike the fresh produce, processed products are easy to transport. He says once transported unprocessed, a lot of tomatoes, for instance, are damaged.

The gainful story of food processing narrated by Banda is repeated by Mercy Butao, Coordinator of Ngolowindo Horticultural Cooperative Society of Salima.

She says the cooperative society, which mostly processes baobab fruits into baobab fruit juice, buys a 25 kilogramme bag of the fruits from local suppliers at K700.

However, after processing the fruits, the 25 kilogramme bag brings them 75 litres of the fruit juice.

“Each litre of the fruit juice is sold at K180. This means that we spoon in K13,500 from the 25 kilogramme bag which we buy at just K700,” says Butao.

“Since we have a steady market in Lilongwe and we buy a lot of these fruits to last until they are in season again, we are not out of business. The processing is not that hard job.”

Unfortunately, although food processing has capacity to spoon a lot of money for individuals that engage it, not many Malawians have embraced it.

A snap check on the Ovop website, www.ovop.org.mw, reveals that only a handful of organisations that enrolled to engage in small-scale manufacturing under the Ovop engaged in food processing.

The list shows that only seven of the organisations, namely Bvumbwe Vegetable Growers Association, Rumphi Cassava Flour making, Lilongwe Cassava Flour and Starch making, Bwanje Rice Milling and Packing, Michiru Khumbo Seed Oil processing, Bvumbwe Milk Processors Group and Mitundu Model Village Factory are in food processing.

Kaluma Sulumba says there are six others that are not on the web site but are in full scale food processing. There is the Mapanga Honey Processors, the Wovwe/Hara Rice scheme, the Limphasa Rice scheme, Nkondezi banana wine manufacturers, Kunthembwe Nsinjiro and Zipatso Association.

But looking at the amount of food produced in the country, this list of food processors is too short.

Agrees Kaluma Sulumba: “A lot needs to be done. It is only a small percentage of the population that is in food processing.

“When you drive along the Blantyre-Lilongwe road, you see a lot of tomatoes. But very little of such produce is processed. People don’t know even how to properly process maize for storage that is why we find that a lot is lost.”

She says because of the absence of processing, demand for most processed foods is not met.

Because of the situation, Ovop is currently training some people who are to work as extension officers closer to the farmers so that whatever is available in an area is properly processed.

“Ours is a bottom-up approach. We want a decentralized set-up. By being exposed to the Ovop concept, they should be able to look at what is in their areas for processing.

“We don’t want to reinvent the processes and the expertise required. As such, we are engaging organisations like the Malawi Bureau of Standards, the Malawi Entrepreneurship Development Institute, Bunda College of Agriculture and the Malawi Industrial Research,” she says.

Such interventions are what would lead Malawians into appreciating the monetary values of food processing.

With a Mwana alirenji food processing programme currently run by the Story Workshop with support from the European Union (EU) in full swing, efforts to change the mindset of those not yet in food processing should not be a big problem.

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