A view from Malawi

This article appeared in the Malawian newspaper The Nation on 25 October 2005:

---
NATION MALAWI

Tuesday, 25 October 2005
Features

Malawi’s food crisis worsens

by George Ntonya, 25 October 2005 - 08:33:50

A village woman and her three year-old daughter sit at the entrance into Lilongwe Hotel premises looking frail and grubby.

She stretches her arm each time a person, particularly the one she thinks has spare money, passes by.

“Njala bwana (I am hungry, Sir),” she says lazily while stretching her arm, hoping the passer-by would drop a Kwacha or two for her to buy some food.

A few metres down the road, from SS Rent-A-Car offices to National Bank, there are also some women strategically positioned, waiting for good Samaritans to drop any kind of assistance they can afford.

The situation worsens on Friday when troops of such women from villages and squatters around the capital city flock into the city to ask for alms, targeting Malawians of Asian origin, who they believe to be in a mood for donations on Friday — their holy day.

A majority of Malawian smallholder farmers harvested barely enough to take them to the next harvest because of a dry spell that occurred at the end of the rainy season and the scarcity of fertilizer at the beginning of the season, two factors that contributed significantly to poor national harvest.

Currently, nearly 4.5 million Malawians are believed to be in need of food aid. Some may die of hunger-related illnesses if government and donor agencies do not engage top gear to scale up efforts to make food available in all the areas of the country.
At the moment most Admarc depots do not have maize, the country’s staple food.

During the 2001/2002 food crisis tens of Malawians, most of them children and women, died of hunger-related illnesses. Cases of malnutrition were commonplace.

World Food Programme (WFP) deputy executive director Sheila Sisulu who was in the country a few days ago to assess the food situation, said in an interview Malawi risks sliding into a food crisis similar to the one that occurred in 2001/2002 if the government and the donor community do not scale up efforts to make food available to the hungry households.

“We need to get the food to places where it is needed almost immediately,” said Sisulu who held discussions with President Bingu wa Mutharika, government officials and representatives of the donor community and NGOs on the current food situation.

“There are several pressures on the short window we have to avert the crisis. That window is between now and the end of December,” she added.

Malawi and Zimbabwe are the worst hit by the food shortage in the southern African region.

President Bingu wa Mutharika declared a state of national disaster last Friday and appealed to the international community for support.

A statement released by WFP on October 16, World Food Programme, quotes the organisation’s Executive Director James Morris as saying that at a time when the world has been shocked by the horrific images of the earthquake in Pakistan, where some 20,000 lives were wiped out in a matter of a few seconds, there is also the biggest killer — hunger — that is away from cameras.

“Few people realise that hunger and related diseases still claim more lives than Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined. What is worse, the number of chronically hungry is on the rise again, after decades of progress. We’re losing ground,” Morris is quoted as saying.

Morris contrasted the situation in developed countries, where the most vulnerable are protected by special provisions, such as social services, unemployment benefit, child allowances and income support, to that in the developing world such as Malawi, where there are very few of these safety nets.

“Go across sub-Saharan Africa and add conflict and HIV and Aids to the equation, and the situation gets even worse. The spotlight is now on Malawi, where millions of people are facing a food crisis, caused by the failure of seasonal rains and the collapse of food production as a direct result of HIV and Aids,” he said.
But there are indications that the food shortage will recur next year and years thereafter, unless mechanisms are put in place to ensure better yield. There is need for the government to change some of its policies and increase budget allocation and other resources to agriculture. It has also to make farm inputs affordable to the smallholder farmers and help them market their produce at good prices.

People’s Progressive Movement (PPM) president Aleke Banda said unless Malawians change their attitude to work harder in their gardens and government makes farm inputs affordable Malawi will not be able to address the problem of food insecurity.
According to him, laziness is one of the contributing factors to the country’s perpetual problem of food insecurity. At some point, he said, Malawians were known for hard work, but that hard working spirit is absent.

“People have to change their attitude. They have to work hard,” he said.

For two consecutive years Malawi, like South Africa, had substantial maize surplus and commentators believe that the country has the potential to feed itself and say bye to food aid from the donor community.

“Malawi has a lot of water. It does not have to depend on rain-fed agriculture only. Small irrigation scheme can make a difference,” said Sisulu.

Former WFP country director Gerard van Dijk made similar remarks, saying it was sad that Malawi had to look for international support for food when it could produce its own food.

“It’s always difficult to explain [the food insecurity] to outsiders seeing such a green country,” he said adding that despite the support the country has been receiving from the international community Malawi continues to be among the poorest countries, where many people have no food most of the time.

Natural disasters and international action

There has been a spate of natural disasters in recent months which have caused massive loss of life, including:

* The Asian Tsunami
* Floods in China
* Hurricanes Katrina and Stan
* Earthquake in Pakistan
* Drought in Malawi

The effectiveness of the UN and 'international community' in responding to these has been variable. Perhaps there is scope to address this through the Simultaneous Policy - SP (http://www.simpol.org.uk/).

Disasters on such a scale need a global response. It has been said that the number of winter tents needed for people made homeless by the Pakistan earthquake is greater than the number known to exist in the world.

While the 'international community' is sometimes quick to respond, as in the case of the Asian Tsunami when aid agencies said they had received sufficient donations and didn't want any more, in others the response is woeful.

The case of Malawi is particularly troubling to me as I lived and worked there for four years in the 1990s and still have friends in the country (see article below). One of my friends lives in a small village where there is literally no food and people are starving to death. His best friend died last week. While there are UN systems to deal with such situations they are inadequate. An appeal has been made for donations to provide food to the 5 million people at risk of malnutrition in Malawi and very little has been provided by governments or the public.

An emergency fund which could be called upon for such situations could be the solution. There have been suggestions of creating funds for development from a tax on currency transactions - the Tobin Tax. There could be other solutions. The member states of the UN have committed to provide 0.7% of GDP towards development, but virtually none have reached this target. The US uses its contributions to UN bodies as a political weapon, holding back funds when it objects to policy lines developed through the pseudo-democratic decision making bodies of organisations such as the World Health Organisation. If it has been agreed, should there be some way of ensuring it is gathered? Within the European Union, for example, Value Added Tax is used as the principle way that governments make their contributions to the EU budget.

A few years ago the World Development Movement highlighted how privatization policies forced on the country by the IMF had reduced food security and exacerbated the hunger problem (there is more on this in the article below).

When thinking of lasting solutions to poverty, aid is usually seen as a sticking plaster and we should really devote our energies to sustainable development. Yet if even the US has to call on international help to cope with a natural disaster, perhaps we have to re-think how we deal with aid and include some form of safety net within the SP policy package to ensure that help is not dependent on the whim of politicians, the media and the public, but a right of all.

I plan to keep this Malawi blog going for a while and have asked friends in Malawi to also contribute information about their experiences. Though their immediate priority is staying alive and helping their neighbours stay alive, this may also help to bring them into the SP campaign and we certainly need greater involvement from people in southern countries.

Your comments are also welcome.

If you are interested in attending a public meeting to discuss these issues further - while helping to raise some money for disaster relief in Malawi - please see http://www.pledgebank.com/dealwithdisaster/ to indicate your interest and to receive an invitation when the event is organised.

Friends in Malawi

Friends in Malawi

It’s not unusual for friends in Malawi to ask for money, but this message from Francis was different. He sent it from a computer in a forestry office at Mulanje Mountain and it warned me this may be the last time I would hear from him because he was starving.

Thinking it a little melodramatic I emailed him back telling him to borrow some money for maize for him and his family and I would send a moneygram to the bank in the small town 10 miles away as soon as I could.

Francis used to be a porter accompanying people up Mulanje Massif, which includes the highest peak in Central Africa, Sapitwa, which means ‘don’t go there’ because of the spirits and their powerful magic. The water running off Mulanje is valued by healers across the region. Tourists, ex-pats and volunteers from Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), Peace Corps and their equivalent cared not for this, seeking the nature, greenness and escape from the frustrations of living in one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries.

VSO placed me in the government secondary school in Mulanje to teach science to boys and girls mainly from mud and thatch villages forced to learn in English, their second or third language. It is a measure of their determination and intelligence that some could look beyond their every day experience in a land with no television to atomic theory and Newtonian physics and grasp this alien view of the world.

Francis didn’t make it to secondary school, though he learned to read and write at a Distance Education Centre, where radio programmes are supplemented by heroic teachers in classes of over a hundred. We became friends through frequent trips up the mountain when I acted as tour guide to other volunteers. As a thank you to the porters, I organized the first Mulanje Mountain Race under the auspices of the ex-pat Mountain Club, which paid for prizes and a party. Ten years on the race is established as an annual event on the weekend closest to Mothers’ Day, a national holiday in July. Porters, club members and latterly national and international athletes race from Likhabula Forest Office up to Chambe hut, amongst the pine forests which provides employment to wood cutters and carriers, across the top of the valley and down the path on the other side, known as the ‘milk run’ from when milk was carried to ex-pats who retreated to the cool of Lichenya Plateau during the dry months in colonial times when Malawi was Nyasaland.

In that first race Francis was one of my marshals charged with signing the card of each entrant to prove they had taken no short cut. The race was won by Benson, the nightwatchman at the forest office with a time of about 2 hours and 30 minutes, just 30 seconds before a porter from the forest office around the mountain.

I saw Mulanje Mountain last week in the reports of the famine striking Malawi. People were scrambling for maize at an empty distribution centre. There was no mention of the role neo-liberal policies have played in reducing food security in Malawi. In 2002 the government agriculture development body ADMARC was sold under advice, or pressure, from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the government’s strategic maize reserve was sold. In the old model, ADMARC bought surpluses at time of plenty, giving farmers an income. 70% of the population are smallholder farmers. At time of shortage the stored produce was sold back. Under the new model, some is sold to neighbouring countries to earn foreign currency and the rest is hoarded so prices and profits increase if famine strikes. The last drought in 2002 was less severe than others experienced by Malawi, but more people starved to death. For a detailed analysis download the World Development Movement report Structural Damage.

When Francis thanked me for the money that had paid for food for his extended family for the month – the impact of the £ 40 I had sent – he told me 29 people, mostly children, had not been so lucky and had died in the past few weeks. The following month I sent twice as much and asked him to use it wisely to help people in his village. He bought 9 bags of maize, set aside 3 for his family for the month and distributed the rest to orphans dependent on grandparents. Malawi has one of the highest HIV infection rates in Africa leaving orphans, who are the most vulnerable when disaster strikes. His village has yet to see any outside help. The World Food Programme has arrived in the area, but is only able to help a small percentage in the villages it is able to visit.

To help provide more maize to his village, I am organising a jumble sale on eBay. Please visit. My historic and much prized Q magazine collection is up for sale for starters. Look out for some arts and crafts from Francis’s village in coming weeks.

£ 9 will buy a bag of maize or an adult goat able to give milk.

£ 2 will buy a mature chicken to lay eggs.

I am concerned about keeping my friend, his family and neighbours alive, but they are few in a country of many in need. If nothing in my sale grabs your attention, please consider sending a donation to UNICEF.

Next July is the 10th anniversary of the Mulanje Mountain Race and it has been a dream to find a way back to take part and visit the school where I taught and the hospital I maintained on a second VSO placement. Now money to send is the priority.

If the rains fall well and the harvest is plentiful, perhaps my trip will be possible to see how my friends in Malawi have coped through this difficult time.