Malawi is wooing her development partners to assist rejuvenate the cotton industry to meet international standards, a senior official in the Ministry of Trade and Industry has said.

Cotton production in the country started declining in the late 1980s after farmers started diverting their attention from the crop to others due to poor market.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with Nyasa Times , on the sidelines of a training on Malawi Cotton Trade Development, currently underway at Nchalo in Chikwawa district, Director of Trade, Harrison Mandindi said government has involved its partners to see how best to bring the industry back to its life.

Mandindi said Malawi had a potential market and stands to benefit a lot from some of the opportunities and trade agreements like the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA).

He said the training workshop was one of various interventions government has embarked to train on the technical aspects of cotton production and trade.

Mandindi said over 500 cotton farmers and some extension workers from different parts of the Shire Valley have been targeted for the training.

"Malawi used to have an international reputation of producing quality cotton until the late 1980s, it is government's intention, therefore, to rejuvenate the industry to become more productive again and attract a higher reward in turn," he said.

According to Mandindi, by the end of the programme, farmers would have acquired necessary farming knowledge and skills to make their farming more profitable and increase productivity to a predicted 3, 000 Kgs per hectare.

Currently, farmers harvest less than 800 Kgs per hectare. International Trade Centre (ITC) is providing technical and financial support for the Malawi Cotton Trade and Development workshop whose facilitators are from Uganda, Kenya, Zambia and the host, Malawi.

A few months ago, there was jubilation in the Lower Shire area after government directed that cotton price increase to K30 per Kg.

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