Agriculture in Malawi

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The country of Malawi is located in southern Africa, and dealt with famines for many years. Following a bad corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of Malawi's 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

[edit] New successes in 2007

In 2007, Malawi began actually exporting food. As of 2007, it was selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other southern Africa country, and was exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe. Occurrences of acute child hunger has fallen sharply.

In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, which is used to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead of Malawi, the original destination. Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said it was unneeded.

Most farmers attribute Malawi’s new success to new government subsidies for fertilizer. This marks a major departure from World Bank receommendations. Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and several rich nations which give aid to Malawi have pressed for free market policies including to cut back or eliminate subsidies for fertilizer and other items.

The 2005 harvest was the worst in a decade, and Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to subsidize various agricultural items such as fertilizer. Mutharika initiated reinstating and increasing fertilizer subsidies despite skepticism from the United States and Britain.

Malawi’s soil is depleted, like that of other local countries. Many of its farmers cannot afford fertilizer at current market prices. Mutharika stated, “As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”

The success of these subsidies is causing reexamination of the role of agriculture in helping poor in Africa, and of government investment in basic components of farming, such as fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research. ^[1]