Friday, February 27, 2009

Creating hope for food processors

For all the time he has been in food processing, ensuring that their product attracts the consumer is what has bothered the mind of Prince Mang’ombe and all those with whom he runs the Wovwe Rice Producers and Processors Association.

Their product, Kilombero, is a rice brand so popular and tried and tested for one to ignore. But Mang’ombe and his friends have remained worried.

“Enhancing hygiene during food processing is of paramount importance. Any food discovered to be contaminated will be shunned regardless of how good it looks,” says Mang’ombe.

“Packaging and its design is another challenge that we need to overcome if our product is to continue attracting customers on the market.”

These challenges are not only for the Karonga-based group which is registered under the One Village One Product (Ovop). Many other organisations established to respond to the call of enhancing production and ensuring good representation of Malawian products on the global market face similar challenges.

The Malawi Bureau of Standards (MBS), an institution established to standardize and accredit manufactured products with the view of removing safety doubts from those wanting to buy it, agrees that most of these organisations are below the desired standards on sanitation and quality control.

“The greatest shortfalls in goods by these organisations have been registered in sanitation and quality control particularly in volume and performance of the products,” says Davlin Chokazinga, MBS Acting Director General.

“But quality management is the most important tool for any business growth. Customers should be assured of safety before they buy the product. There is no entertainment for less quality products on the market.”

With such revelations, the likes of Mang’ombe and company should really be thrown into action, action to improve their situation. There is a lot of potential for Malawian products to penetrate the global market.

But all products targeting global markets have to pass the test of safety or risk rejection. Precedents set elsewhere by food goods lacking safety and quality have given consumers another sense – attention to detail when buying food items.

Less than a month ago, up to 84 children died in Nigeria after being fed on a product aimed at enhancing the growth of milk teeth in the children. The product, My Pikin, Pidgin English for My Child, was found to be containing a thickening agent normally used in brake fluid as an anti-freeze. It was discovered by the National Agency for Food, Drugs Administration and Control (Nafdac).

Again, in 2008, another incident bordering on food safety caused jitters across the world. The incident dubbed “2008 Chinese milk scandal” and registered in the People’s Republic of China involved milk and infant formula, and other food materials and components.

The products were reported to have been contaminated with melamine, a white crystalline solid used in the manufacturing of resins and in leather tanning. With China’s wide range of export food products, the incident affected countries on all continents. China reported an estimated 300,000 victims and up to 860 babies hospitalized.

“The developed world stresses a lot on safety and quality,” added Chokazinga.

Unfortunately, the challenge to ensure safety and quality in goods produced under the Ovop concept is overwhelming the organisations concerned at a time when stakeholders are converging efforts to enhance production initiatives.

With funding from the European Union (EU), The Story Workshop, an organisation promoting grassroot development, is running a Mwana alirenji programme aimed at promoting food processing at household level.

The programme seeks to avert a situation where Malawi keeps harvesting plentiful food, yet failure in storing such food due to lack of expertise in food processing leads the country’s populace to feeling the pinch instituted by hunger.

Recently, the Malawi Government also signed a partnership creating a highway for a lot of locally produced goods to Chinese markets. The agreement is an addition to other initiatives aimed at sending Malawian products to regional and overseas markets including EU countries.

The development means that a lot of items would be processed. Unfortunately, they would not take advantage of the several agreements and offer competition on the global market unless safety and quality controls are swiftly adopted.

“There is no room for substandard products,” says Director of Industry in the Ministry of Industry and Trade Chris Kachiza. “There could be opportunities, but without quality products risk rejection.

“Customers will shun them and prefer foreign products. That has been proven even on the domestic market. Customers go for quality products and those that are well packaged. You can rest assured that a customer will go for a bottle of honey that does not leak even when a bottle that leaks contains the same quality of honey.”

Fortunately, hope is being created to see products like those of the Wovwe Rice Producers and Processors Association and other Ovop-registered manufacturers adopt safety thereby trade competitively on the global market. The MBS has targeted such groups, teaching them how to add quality to and enhance safety of their products.

The MBS, blamed for not standardizing most of these products leading to their tough life on the market, is coordinating workshops on how these groups could add quality to their products.

Chokazinga said on the sidelines of an opening ceremony for a two-day Food Safety and Quality Assurance workshop in Blantyre Tuesday that equipping a participant with such skills would cost K20,000 a day. But what is at stake convinced the organisation to facilitate the workshop for free.

“Liberalisation has opened up opportunities for products to trade freely and without barriers. As we send our products on the global markets customers should be assured of safety,” said Chokazinga. The Blantyre workshop attracted 25 representatives from across the country. They included Mang’ombe.

The organisation is also visiting individual groups to ensure that they adhere to proper sanitary measures.

Such workshops collectively and generally target those organisations operating under the Ovop concept. However, with the impact of My Pikin and the Chinese Milk scandal fresh in people’s minds, organisations in food processing would be the ones seeing greatest hope and benefiting the most from such initiatives.

With The Story Workshop promoting food processing under the Mwana alirenji programme and the global market steadily opening up for products processed under initiatives like one by Ovop, Malawian food products could soon find themselves on such markets. But who will risk their lives and go for them when they lack quality and hardly exhibit safety?

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.