After eight of our publication on the Ambition Acedemy website since last year October, the Paprika Project Malawi team got a message from an Indian wholesaler early May. He recently has learned that bird’s eye chili and paprika is produced in Malawi in an organized manner.

He has been working in the spice extraction field for many years. According to him, India is the leading producer of spice oils, oleoresins and natural colors (from paprika and turmeric). Indian companies can import spices duty free, as they export them after value addition. He started sourcing paprika, turmeric, ginger, clove and black pepper light berries from south East Asia and Africa. In India bird’s eye is growing in the north eastern states. Quantity is less and transportation is expensive. Paprika export from Malawi to India could meet meet industrial and domestic purposes, since India is not producing enough. He supposes all the paprika that comes into India via Mozambique and South Africa are of Malawi origin. He is suggesting to visit Malawi and to roll out his action plan.

First meet the farmers directly. Since quality is of high importance, extraction companies’ needs properly dried and cleaned raw material, otherwise capsaicin and color will be lost. Raw material should also give a minimum extraction yield and high concentration of constituents, like capsaicin (in bird’s eye chili) color value for paprika.

Secondly visit the warehouses to see how they stack them, pack it, and handle it and to take samples. Once samples are approved and price is set, shipments will be made under supervision. In terms of export volume, paprika color is number one. Since Malawi is in the southern hemisphere, it is an advantage for supplies while off season in the northern hemisphere.

We have distributed the message to both of our project board members in Malawi. We hope to hear soon if this contact is of any intersest to one of them.

The email connection with Oikonomos Malawi has been re-installed since a local technical problem has been overcome.

Our final document with recommendations and conclusions has been finalized and has been distributed to our Project Board. We are looking forward to their (positive) feedback.

Gerard Adriaanse, Rob Jonkman, Henk Keizer and Gerard van Kilsdonk.