Tobacco in Malawi: Massive production threatens health and fails to meet citizens' expectations

Written by: Mohamed Abdellah

It is Malawi It is one of the largest exporters of tobacco leaves in Africa, producing in 2015 22.6% of the continent’s total tobacco leaf production.

Tobacco use in Malawi

Tobacco is one of the main causes of deforestation in the country. Government ministers have described tobacco as a strategic crop for Malawi and have advocated for the country to continue investing in its production. However, export revenues from tobacco leaves have declined sharply in recent years.

Three of the four largest transnational tobacco companies – Philip Morris International (PMI), Imperial Brands, and British American Tobacco (BAT) – purchase tobacco leaves from the country’s main leaf distributors, Universal Leaf (known in Malawi as Limbe Leaf) and Alliance One, while Japan Tobacco International (JTI) purchases its own tobacco leaves from the country.

China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC), the world's largest tobacco company, also buys small quantities of tobacco from Limby Leaf and Alliance One, companies specializing in buying leaves. .

Euromonitor International estimated the value of the cigarette market in Malawi in 2018 at approximately US$101.9 million, with the number of cigarettes at 2,408.9 million. .

In 2018, the Malawian parliament passed the Tobacco Industry Bill to update the Tobacco Act 1970 and prevent tobacco companies from exploiting farmers, but this law is not an anti-tobacco law.

As researchers from the Lilongwe Agricultural Research and Development Centre commented in the Tobacco Atlas, although the law is promoted as protecting farmers, many farmers feel that it actually harms them more than it did before the new law. Instead, the law regulates and modernizes tobacco cultivation and the wholesale purchase, sale and export of tobacco leaves.

JTI said it worked alongside the government in drafting the bill in 2018 with tobacco industry stakeholders and expressed its support for it, hoping it would not be delayed.“

In 2021, Malawi ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control until August 2023; however, it lacked a tobacco control program and implemented almost no measures in this regard.

Tobacco companies and the government of Malawi

Tobacco leaf suppliers, including Alliance One, have regularly announced their corporate social responsibility activities, including building schools and donating to orphanages as a strategy to combat child labor or to disaster relief funds.

Alliance One was commended for building a school in the hometown of Malawi’s president, Chakwera, where the company reportedly spent 153 million Malawian kwacha (approximately US$201,750) on primary school construction projects in the country. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control describes the corporate social responsibility of tobacco companies, and its promotion, as “fundamentally inconsistent,“ and recommends not banning all such activities by tobacco companies.

Also active in Malawi is the Foundation for the Elimination of Child Labour in Tobacco Farming (ECLT), an organization funded and run by tobacco companies. Also operating in the country is the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, a front wholly funded by Philip Morris International (PMI), which has several beneficiaries in Malawi, including the Centre for Agricultural Transformation (CAT) and the Malawi Institute for the Advancement of Agricultural Transformation Policies (MwAPATA).

Although tobacco remains Malawi’s main export and a primary source of income for many Malawians, it is unlikely that this crop will provide a sustainable source of income in the long term due to declining global demand.