Malawi continues to lose opportunities for promoting national food security and sustainable water management through development of an integrated irrigation program. This program can establish both sustainable small holder farming and commercial farming while abating devastating annual floods along the Shire River Valley.
Does it make sense that after independence, we continue relying heavily on rain fed scattered subsistence farms in search of moisture along the banks of the Shire River and marshes conflicting with hippos and crocodiles? Do we blame our people to live in the flood plains in search of moisture and fertile alluvial soils because we cannot grow in uplands due to infertile dry land characterised by salty colluvial and eluvial soils affected by unreliable weather?
As this is not enough, aren’t these people affected by week agriculture extension and support services and poor market infrastructure and feeder roads to market centres?
The solution to food insecurity and devastating floods is the development of Shire Valley Irrigation Project (SVIP) along the western bank of Shire River. Over two feasibility studies were undertaken between late 1960 and 2010. Nothing has happened and we are going into other studies focussing mainly on promotion of commercial farming and excluding mitigation of floods.
If the Shire Valley Irrigation Project was properly designed and government put emphasis on using local resources served from unproductive investments, as was done with Kapichira Hydropower Phase II project, 55,000 households in the Shire Valley and other households in the country would benefit from the project. Eighty percent of the project area is held under customary tenure and administered by traditional authorities. Ten percent is under private lease or freehold and the remainder is public land. Most of the private land is under sugar plantation.
The concept of the Irrigation Project is to draw water from Kapichira through a main canal passing through a 100 metre above sea level contour canal (along higher ground to the west the Shire River up to Bangula in Nsanje). This would then feed small water canals into the valley for irrigation farming. In times of heavy rain this main canal can carry water above Kapichira to Shire River below Ruo River thereby leaving room for water from the eastern Shire Highlands or Thyolo escarpment to flow into the Shire River reducing the negative effect of heavy flooding.
It is sad to note that most of the farmland on the eastern bank of the Shire River is covered by sand thereby rendering subsistence farming difficult if not impossible. A good example is on the lower reaches of Likhubula and Mwamphanzi Rivers.
The sand has come from the Shire Highlands which have been affected by deforestation and land degradation. Over exploitation of forests for wood energy and unsustainable agricultural practices have caused this. This can be a subject for future presentation.
The whole appeal here is for Malawi to think strategically. Our destiny is in our hands not donor money. The private sector can also be encouraged to invest in this project through promotion of integrated farming system. This includes commercial farming for high value commercial crops such as cotton, rice and maize, horticulture, livestock development and agro processing. Let us continue dreaming in colour as my mentor once said. May His Soul Rest in Peace.
