A version of this article was originally published in News Africa magazine on October 31, 2011. It was coauthored with Caroline Kandiero.

Henry Tambula stands before a barren field and sweeps his arm across the horizon. “We gave tobacco all of this land,” he laments. “We wasted all of our time.”

The fertile earth lies unused, and all that’s left of a series of curing barns that once lined its side are a few piles of black plastic sheeting.

“We built very good barns too,” Tambula notes. “But now, there is no way we were going to keep them.”

There are 91 such sites on the farm that Tambula manages. “It is a complete disaster,” he exclaims. “I’ve grown tobacco for 25 years and what happened this year has never happened in Malawi. We will never go back to tobacco.”

The calamity that Tambula spoke of is the shocking decline of Malawi’s tobacco industry. Faced with a global recession, oversaturated markets, and ever-growing antismoking campaigns, national earnings are down 57 per cent from the previous year, from $352.9m to $151.4m.

On the way to the auction floor, Tambula said he expected to sell 100 hectares of tobacco for a yearly total of $41,8750. But today, he is yet to break and the selling season is coming to an end.

Tambula is not alone in his predicament. Up to 85 per cent of Malawians rely on agriculture to feed their families. At its peak, tobacco accounted for 70 per cent of exports and 35 per cent of GDP.

“The poor people in the village, the farmers there who grew tobacco, they bought fertilisers and also employed people to help them,” Tambula said. “They are not going to be able to recover their money. Those people are even worse off. It is terrible. A disaster.”

Farmers in Malawi relied heavily on tobacco because the returns were regularly high. Having learned from their mistakes, Tembula has vowed to never again place all of his eggs in one basket.

At Chikale Estate in Zomba District, he expressed great optimism for the season ahead following the decision to diversify. Tembula explained that this year, the 168 hectares of arable land he oversees is seeded with a wide range of crops. Chikale Estate will grow more than a dozen assorted fruits, vegetables, nuts, and herbs, he said. It’s all part of the farm’s parent company, Mulli Brothers, new emphasis on diversification.

With strong encouragement from both the market as well as government, fields long reserved for tobacco are today ready to grow everything but. For sound fiscal policy as well as national food security, the changes sweeping Malawi amount to no less than a rebirth of the country’s agricultural sector.

Nevertheless, tobacco’s fall from grace has hit agricultural workers hard. In an announcement that made front-page headlines in August, Press Agriculture Limited (PAL), the largest tobacco player in the country, disclosed that it was ceasing production of tobacco on all 112 of its estates. The news meant that 56,000 hectares of arable land would be left waiting to be repurposed, and some 2,000 full-time employees and as many as 25,000 seasonal workers will lose their jobs at the end of this fiscal quarter on September 31.

“This layoff will surely increase the unemployment rate for Malawi, which is already high,” PAL executive Alfred Nkhono wrote in a frank email. In a separate interview, Clement Chilingu, chief executive officer for Press Trust, PAL’s parent company, put it a different way. “It’s crunch time,” he explained. “The industry has consistently made losses for five years. You come to a point when you say that you have to stop.”

But like Mulli Brothers, PAL is placing its hopes in other crops. “PAL is looking for investors who would go into joint ventures with us or sublease some of the estates for a long term to productively use these extobacco estates,” Nkhono emphasised. “PAL shall review all joint venture and sublease proposals and business plans to ensure that they are viable, sustainable and productively utilise the existing land.”

He pledged that as fields were prepared for new crops, employees and seasonal help would be rehired. PAL is in the early stages of executing a diversification programme, Nkhono noted. And with PAL being the agricultural giant that it is, the thinking is this will contribute to the entire nation’s food security in a very tangible way.

Stakeholders outside the farming industry are also working to ensure that one crop’s failure will never again take the nation down with it. The federal government has created a fund to help increase the production of cotton in Malawi and has guaranteed a set of minimum prices for it. And from the large pool of non-governmental organisations in Malawi, Putting Farmers First, an initiative of Canadian Physicians for Aid Relief (CPAR), is currently expanding efforts already underway.

“Crop diversification is one of a series of sustainable farming techniques at the core of CPAR’s approach that improve crop production and expand opportunities for farmers to lead competitive agricultural production efforts,” said programme officer Kevin O’Neill. “By moving away from monocropping, small-scale farmers lessen their dependency on the success of that crop.”

While players like Mulli Brothers and Press Agriculture recognise that farming is the mainstay of the Malawi economy, their primary goal is profits. But for CPAR, it is the opposite. O’Neill argued that the transformation of Malawi’s agricultural sector is a matter of human rights. “People’s right to food is driven by the notion that food should be accessible to all – sustained year-round; available to all – sufficient in supply; adequate for all- nutritionally adequate and from a sustainable food system), and acceptable to all (culturally appropriate and respectful of traditions.”

But agriculture is a business. In the long term, the only strategies that a company will stick with are those that payout sufficient dividends. Joseph Nedi, farm manager for Thuchila Estate in Philombe District, said that that’s exactly what diversification will achieve.

Thuchila Estate has always grown a wide assortment of products, he noted, and that has kept it prepared for market fluctuations like last year’s tobacco crash. Earlier this year, Nedi was in the process of scaling up Thuchila’s tobacco operation from 15 hectares to 50. Supplies for curing barns had already been bought and paid for and construction was underway. But when it became clear how far prices would fall, he quickly abandoned plans to increase Thuchila’s stake in tobacco. “Management was not happy and we have demolished the sheds,’ Nedi said. ‘Money lost. Now, we are using the wood for ki tchen fires.”

Thankfully, the farm’s other crops meant the company was able to survive the blow. “Diversification is a good technique because there is less risk of total loss or threats to food supplies due to weather conditions or adverse forces,” Nedi explained. “Because if Tobaa:o auctioneers – a downturn in demand means that many are looking to other crops one crop fails, you can rely on the other crops, for example, tobacco. If we were only growing tobacco, we would have been finished.”

Prince Kapondamgaga, executive director for the Farmers Union of Malawi, believes that the diversification of Malawi’s agricultural sector is “long overdue”. “I think it is a different way of looking at adding value to commodities: he said. “If you look at tobacco, for instance, it became popu1ar because it was one of the major forex earners because government had invested well. It had organised a marketing system. But what happened of late is, over time, other areas have not developed and investments were not made.”

Now, Kapondamgaga continued, “the government has taken efforts [to encourage diversification] and I am very sure that what government is doing is making investments with the proper people.”

Kapondamgaga conceded that this season was tough on farmers. But he wagered there are bright days ahead. “I have been at meetings with government and with the minister of agriculture and the government is working to identify commodities of value and agricultural commodities that will compliment tobacco,” he said.

Of course, not everybody in Malawi is giving up on the country’s so-called “green gold”. Bruce Munthali, chief executive of Malawi’s Tobacco Control Commission, argues that “genuine tobacco growers” will continue with the crop they know. “The tobacco industry will still survive in Malawi,” he maintained. There is still demand out there for the product. All we need to do is embrace the necessary reforms.”

A group of tobacco farmers in Malawi’s Central Region have echoed Munthali. One of them, Nyamulani Kamchirika, recently vowed on national radio that he would never abandon tobacco. He urged others to do the same, but to take extra care with preparations this season.

Yet the reality is that a significant number of Malawi’s 13.1 million citizens who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods have lost faith in tobacco. As they wait for November’s rains, it is crops such as chickpeas, soy, and, of course, maize, that farmers hope will see them recoup money lost.

With the company’s books sprawled open before him, Tambula insists that he has crunched the numbers and will soon see Chikale Estate out of the red. “These crops we have chosen, they will let us be able to pay for all inputs and also make a profit,” he said with confidence. “And we will not talk about tobacco again.”

More photos at my Flickr stream.

A version of this article was first published in News Africa magazine on September 28, 2011. It was coauthored with Caroline Kandiero.