Malawi

Malawi – Lilongwe

A visit to the tobacco auction house, a vast warehouse of over 30,000m² undercover in one building split into the delivery and then auction area itself. The auction room had 50 lines of bags of tobacco with 100 bags per line, each one weighing approximately 100kg each selling for an average of $2/kg. Watching the auction happen was incredible, the auctioneer and his team walk up and down each line and auction off each bag individually with all the bidders from various local tobacco processing plants were bidding to get the bags. It was similar to the old nokia game “snake” where every time you eat something it gets longer, this seemed similar every time a bag of tobacco was sold another person joined the line! The auction house sells approximately 8000 bags of tobacco daily, so it’s a busy place from the start where bags are offloaded from lorries, weighed and stacked into different type, stored then transported to auction house, sold then loaded again to processing factories. Every time a bag is moved, it’s loaded onto a pallet truck then people race along to deliver it for the next phase.

A visit around the production factory for Premier Tama Tobacco, a 38,000m² building comprised of 6 Nr. 30m clear span structures approximately 200m long, fantastic steel structure! We enjoyed a tour from Bernard about the entire process from the leaf to prepared tobacco shipped to cigarette production factories.

 A burning Jatropha nut demonstrating the amount of fuel within.

Kate and myself visited BERL – Bio Energy Resources Limited, the core business is built around the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy bio fuels. The company works with over 25,000 local farm families planting Jatropha trees as an additional crop to their primary (food) and secondary (cash) crops. The Jatropha nuts are processed to produce Jatropha oil for blending with diesel. We were privileged to enjoy a tour of the new processing facility from Laurie and Tim and the entire process from farm to oil was explained.

We did enjoy a night out with some of the Rotarians from Lilongwe and Bwaila and got to experience some of the nightlife in Malawi, we visited Harrys bar and sampled some local beer – Carlsberg! I discovered last night that this is the only beer in Malawi as the previous president liked it so much that he said to Carlsberg, you come into my country and make Carlsberg here and I will make sure that you are the only company selling beer here and set this agreement up for 25 years! We popped into the Diplomats pub to listen to the live band and boogie. 

 Good times!!