The main economic products of Malawi are tobacco, tea, cotton, groundnuts, sugar and, coffee. These have been among the main cash crops for the last century, but tobacco has become increasingly predominant in the last quarter-century, with a production in 2011 of 175,000 tonnes. Over the last century, tea and groundnuts have increased in relative importance while cotton has decreased. The main food crops are maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, sorghum, bananas, rice,and Irish potatoes and cattle, sheep and goats are raised. The main industries deal with agricultural processing of tobacco, tea and sugar and timber products. The industrial production growth rate is estimated at 10% (2009).
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“In past years, the amount of money that has had to be been spent on armaments, great and small, instead of on productive industry and agriculture and the arts, has been a disgrace to all of us in every part of the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)