ANALYSIS OF EFFECTIVE MARKET LINKAGES IN PROMOTING INVESTMENTS IN NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN THE RICE-BASED FARMING SYSTEM IN MALAWI: A CASE OF NKHATE IRRIGATION SCHEME

Abstract

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceThis study focuses on assessing how effective market linkages have promoted investments in natural resource management in the smallholder rice-based farming systems in Nkhate Irrigation Scheme, in the context of the Enabling Rural Livelihoods approach. As both income and investment in natural resource management is linked to the wealth status of the farmers, a participatory wealth ranking exercise was done to group farmers into resource groups. Farmers were grouped into three resource-endowment classes; high resource-endowment (RG 1), intermediate (RG 2) and resource-constrained (RG 3), on the basis of cattle ownership, use of mineral fertilizers and land ownership. The study used household data on these resource groups to address two specific objectives in influence of enhanced farmer market linkages: (i) to assess the profitability of rice (ii) to assess farmer decisions on allocation of income from rice to natural resource management. The results indicate that from the participatory gross margin analysis which was done by CIAT ( 2007) with rice farmers at the irrigation scheme, it was revealed that farmers have been making losses in the marketing of Kirombero and Super Fire rice varieties and have been realizing a very small positive margin for Mtupatupa a local rice variety. The analysis revealed gross margins of 36.78 US$ha-1, -182.50 US$ ha-1, and 60.36 US$ha-1, for Super fire, Kirombero and Mtupatupa varieties respectively. However, after farmers were effectively linked to markets, farmers realized gross margins of 681.84US$ ha-1, 664.23US$ha-1 and 1,028.69US$ ha-1 for Mtupatupa, Super fire and Kirombero rice varieties respectively. The results further showed that a lot of investment from money gotten from rice sales has gone into improving food security and the accumulation of household assets as well as improving the dwelling houses. This was regardless of farmer's wealth status