From around 1940, the aim of the NTB was less about restricting African tobacco production and more about generating governmental revenues, supposedly for development but still involving the diversion of resources away from smallholder farming.
In 1956, the activities, powers and duties of what had by then been renamed the African Tobacco Board were transferred to the Agricultural Production and Marketing Board, which had powers to buy smallholder surpluses of tobacco, maize, cotton and other crops, but whose producer prices continued to be biased against peasant producers.
In part, this was because it competed with the dark-fired tobacco grown by tenants on their estates, which made up around a quarter of the dark-fired tobacco crop in 1936,[3] and which was used to pay rent in kind to those owners, but also because of fears that profitable smallholder farming would limit the availability of cheap African labour on the estates.
The declared objectives of this legislation were to increase the quantity and improve the quality of the tobacco crop and to stabilise the income of farmers through periods of price fluctuation.
Growers were registered, producer prices fixed and exporters licensed by the Board, which had exclusive responsibility for crop production and marketing.
[6] The formation of the Native Tobacco Board stimulated African production in the Central Region, but registered growers paid heavily for it.
At first, the Board charged a levy of thirty pence a hundred pounds of tobacco, 10% of the price it paid growers.
This system was formalised in legislation, the Natives on Private Estates Ordinance 1928, which allowed rents to be paid in cash, by delivering a fixed quantity of acceptable crops or by direct labour.
At first, these farmed Crown land, but later leasehold estates were formed, which gave contracts, usually for a single growing season, to sharecropping “Visiting Tenants”.
The Nyasaland administration did not encourage independent peasant tobacco production in the Southern Region where most settler estates were located.
The main growth in demand was for a light-coloured, mild-flavoured flue-cured leaf suitable for cigarettes, which was difficult to produce in areas of Malawi such as the Shire Highlands with high rainfall.
Unlike its predecessors or successors, it neither attempted to restrict who grew tobacco or paid manifestly artificially low prices for their product.