Print This PageGrowing Hope in Africa
Hugh Grant Visits Malawi
Monsanto has had a business in Malawi since 1998, when we purchased the Cargill (National Seed Company of Malawi) seed business, which had been operating there since 1989.1 Today, Monsanto has 22 employees in Malawi, which makes it one of our largest locations in Africa. Our modern seed production facility in Lilongwe has a capacity of 10,000 metric tons.
In
January 2007, Monsanto’s Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant visited Malawi
to meet with farmers and see recent yield improvements firsthand at one of
the five Millennium Villages where Monsanto seed had been donated.
“The striking thing from my visit to Africa was seeing just the extraordinary leverage that good, quality seed has had on their lives,” Grant said. “The leverage of decent germplasm and a little splash of fertilizer just makes an enormous difference.”
“It becomes more than subsistence — you move toward a surplus and get cash into the system that generates trade, and you build or drive education,” Grant said. “And by doing all those things, you get a village up off its knees and back on its feet.”
Why is Monsanto in Malawi? “I subscribe strongly to the view that you can do good business and do good,” says Grant. “Some of the people who are starting these programs will be our customers in the future. A piece of this will be philanthropic, but there’s a piece that’s the ground floor of a whole new generation of customers.”
