Aid ThoughtsMasimba Tafirenyika describes how dire the food security situation in Malawi has become:
Once again Malawi finds itself in a tight spot. A food crisis set off by erratic rains, rising food prices and economic hardships is slowly unfolding. For the first time in several years, the country's ability to feed its citizens is at risk. Sadly and unexpectedly, Malawi has lost its hard-earned status as an agricultural success story — it used to produce enough maize for its people to eat and still provide a surplus to neighbours. Many are now wondering what went wrong and whether there could be lessons for other African countries.
More than 1.63 million people, or 11 per cent of the population, are facing severe food shortages, according to the World Food Programme, a UN relief agency. Malawi needed $30 million to the end of 2012 to cover the shortfall.
As Tafirenyika hints, this stands in stark contrast to reporting on Malawi over the past few years, where it was heralded as a shining example of how to tackle food security. Five years, ago Celia Dugger wrote in the NYT how the country's president, Bingu wa Mutharika, despite the protests of many, "ignored the experts" and subsequently dealt with the country's hunger problems by drastically scaling up its fertiliser subsidy programme. Malawi subsequently enjoyed a spate of bumper harvests and many were quick to tout the large-scale subsidisation as being both a success and worth of replication in other countries. Most notable was the support of Jeffrey Sachs, who's incessant belief that the fertiliser subsidisation was a policy holy grail led him to write an oddly-appreciative obituary for Mutharika, who died at the end of a thuggish, repressive and disastrous second term in office.
Meanwhile, hunger returns to Malawi, but we have not yet established a convincing narrative. Many economists (including a few on this blog) have pointed out, time and time again, that the fertiliser subsidy programme was fraught with pitfalls, both political and practical. While the recent crisis is probably too complex to fully substantiate these concerns, now would be an appropriate time for the fertiliser advocates to turn their attention to the food situation in Malawi, and begin to ask why. Otherwise, we risk touting a policy that might actually have been a complete failure, or at the very least lacked the sort of robustness that anti-hunger policies desperately need.
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Thursday, January 17, 2013
Fwd: How policies end: not with a bang, but a whimper
