Coffee agroforestry holds promise for smallholder growers in Malawi

RUMPHI, Malawi — In the villages below Nyika Plateau in northern Malawi’s Rumphi district, coffee rules. It’s one of the most common bushes in the region, grown in back and front yards or in open fields where, elsewhere, maize would have been cultivated. Here, coffee shares space with banana and other fruit trees around fishponds and water holes, and scales up steep slopes among natural foliage. “It’s the father of all crops here,” says Martha Mhango, a coffee farmer of 22 years in a village located at the boundary of Nyika National Park, Malawi’s largest wildlife reserve. Mhango is a member of a coffee agroforestry project developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Slow Food Coffee Coalition (SFCC), an international network that campaigns for sustainable coffee value chains. In 2022, the two organizations launched a pilot project to promote coffee produced under agroforestry among farmers in Malawi and Uganda. “Basically, the project was meant to integrate agroforestry into coffee production to enhance climate resilience and quality of coffee. Agroforestry has many benefits both to farmers as well as the ecosystem,” says Manvester Ackson Khoza, the SFCC’s national coordinator in Malawi and its international councilor for Southern Africa. Martha Mhango has grown coffee for 22 years, which has allowed her to build a decent house and educate her three children. She has no plans of dropping coffee farming. Image by Charles Mpaka for Mongabay. Agroforestry is a practice where farmers grow trees and shrubs with an agricultural crop…This article was originally published on Mongabay