Coffee beans.

Coffee Agroforestry Holds Promise for Smallholder Growers in Malawi

October 07, 2024 | Source: Mongabay | by Charles Mpaka

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.