The first time I saw the sun rise over a sea of green tobacco fields in Kasungu, I was barely out of university. My boss at the time, Khama, had called at dawn: “We’re going for crop inspection.” The tobacco leaf, Malawi’s “green gold,” was nearly ripe. As our vehicle rolled out of Lilongwe, the mist still clung to the valleys. Farmers bent low, tending plants whose final destination they would never see.
From my window seat, I watched row upon row of lush leaves and imagined their journey. A few months later, one of these leaves would be rolled into a Marlboro cigarette. Somewhere in Manhattan, a stockbroker would close a deal at the New York Stock Exchange, light up, and celebrate. He would not know that the tobacco came from a farmer in Kasungu who sold it for a fraction of the price, nor that the company profiting most was a multinational with operations thousands of miles away.
Back then I worked for one of Malawi’s biggest exporters. Limbe Leaf Tobacco brought in millions of dollars for shareholders and for the Treasury. But even then, a question nagged at me: why do the areas where raw materials are grown remain so poor, while fortunes are built where those raw materials are processed?
Twelve years later, sipping tea and watching a Business Insider documentary with my neighbour, the question returned. We were watching a segment on the “resource curse” in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria. My neighbour turned to me and asked: “Why is it that where the resources come from, the communities are always poor?”
It hit me: the difference is value addition.
At Chinkhoma Auction Floors in Kasungu, there are farmers and buyers. That’s it. The chain stops there. But at the Limbe Leaf factory in Kanengo, a very different story unfolds: engineers calibrating machines, blenders adjusting flavours, HR staff, accountants, logistics managers, quality-control experts. Every step multiplies jobs and skills. When the tobacco leaves Malawi and reaches a factory in Virginia or a blending plant in Switzerland, the scale is even larger — chemists, designers, marketers, compliance officers, legal teams, supply-chain managers.
Economists call this the multiplier effect: every additional stage of processing expands employment, incomes, and local spending. A farmer in Kasungu may hire two helpers at harvest. A factory in North Carolina employs thousands and sustains a whole town’s economy — grocers, teachers, real estate agents, cafés.
The same is true for tea, coffee, sugar, and even our nascent cannabis industry. As development economist Albert Hirschman argued, “Backward and forward linkages determine the spread of benefits.” When production stops at the raw stage, linkages are weak. When countries control the processing and branding, linkages explode.
The truth is, Malawi is stuck at the bottom of the value chain. We export raw materials and import finished products — sometimes at prices far higher than what we were paid for the original raw good. We send out potential wealth and buy back poverty.
To break this cycle, policy makers must do more than simply promote exports. They must build industrial policy around value addition. That means incentives for local processing plants, public-private partnerships for agro-industrial zones, training for technicians and marketers, and reliable infrastructure to make production competitive. It also means a legal and financial environment that encourages Malawian entrepreneurs to own not just the farm but also the factory, the brand, and the market.
Without this, our “green gold” will keep enriching someone else’s economy while our farmers remain trapped in subsistence. With it, we could transform Kasungu and Mchinji from producer districts into thriving industrial hubs, where a farmer’s child might grow up to be not just a grower but an engineer, a marketer, or a CEO in the same value chain.
As the sun rises again over those same fields, I think back to that first trip with Khama. The lesson is as clear now as it was unspoken then: wealth does not lie in the leaf itself, but in what you do with it before it leaves your soil.
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