Agrisciences Department, Mzuzu University

The department of Agri-Sciences aims at contributing to the human capital development required to spur transformational and sustainable agricultural and sustainable development in Malawi. The department is motivated by the status quo of the agricultural sector in Malawi, which is highly skewed towards crop and animal production with most of the output being sold or exported raw. The minimal farmer participation in the agricultural value chains and the presence of middlemen at multiple levels of the value chains deprive farmers of meaningful incomes. Furthermore, as evidenced by poverty prevalence rates in the country, decades of traditional crop and animal production have failed to move most farmers and other agricultural players from the poverty trap perhaps due to the high production costs of most traditional crops such as maize and tobacco. Plantation crops such as coffee, sugar, tea, macadamia, and other nuts are major foreign exchange earners for Malawi. These crops also allow farmers to use the otherwise unused or unusable land profitably either as a group when they are organized or as out-growers when they work with bigger players. Furthermore, the department is motivated to contribute to the comprehension of the rapid changes affecting communities and the larger society attributed to cultural, economic, technological, political, climate change, food security, environmental and human factors at different levels in the society.