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Abstract

For the last 100 years, Malawi, a small and poor but welcoming country in the heart of Africa, has been hooked on tobacco production and exports, which continue to generate 50% of foreign exchange earnings. For many decades the country’s green gold was grown by estates. In the last 30 years, smallholders on customary land have become the main tobacco producers. But despite this shift in the structure of the rural economy, Malawi’s poverty rates have worsened and structural transformation remains a distant dream. This monograph utilises survey, ethnographic, value chain and political economy analysis to understand Malawi’s contemporary developmental challenge and those of similar economies on the continent.

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Correspondence to Martin Prowse .

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Prowse, M., Grassin, P. (2020). Introduction. In: Tobacco, Transformation and Development Dilemmas from Central Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33985-2_1

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